caused all others to be forgotten, except by antiquarians. For this
Dance is the most remarkable embodiment in Art of that fantastic and
grotesque idealism which has found its best expression in the works of
German poets and painters; and the preëminence of Holbein's over all the
other representations of the same subject consists in this,--that, while
they are but a dull and formal succession of mere costumed figures
seized by a corpse and shrinking away from its touch, Holbein's groups
are instinct with life, character, and emotion. In particular is this
true of the figure of Death, although it is a mere skeleton,--the face
without a muscle, and for the eye but a rayless cavern. Death is not one
whom "a limner would love to paint or a lady to look upon"; but Holbein
has given a strange and fascinating interest to the figure, which in all
other hands is merely repulsive. The grim monarch sat to a painter who
not only added to the truthfulness of his portrait the charm of poetic
feeling, but the magic touch of whose pencil made his dry bones live.

The insignificance of the material in which the painter worked, when
compared with the effect which he produced, is also remarkable in this
unique work of Art. For Holbein's Dance of Death is not, like the
others, either a great fresco painting, or a series of sculptures; it
is not a painting at all,--but merely a series of very small woodcuts,
fifty-three in number, forty-six of which were published at Lyons
in 1538, and the whole afterwards at Bâle in 1554, under the title,
_Simulachres de la Mort, Icones Mortis:_ that is, in French and Latin,
"Images of Death,"--for the title "Dance of Death" is of recent origin.
The leaves on which the cuts are printed make but part of a little book
not so large as a child's primer; but a copy of it is now worth ten
times its weight in gold. It was copied and republished in numberless
editions, as a popular book, merely for the sake of the subject, and
the great lesson taught by it,--each print being accompanied by an