all informed with the same motive, it is true, but each independent of
the others, and consisting of a group, generally of but two figures, one
of which is the representative of Death. The second always represents
a class; and in this figure every rank, from the very highest to the
lowest, finds its type. The number of these groups or pictures varies
considerably in the different dances, according to the caprice of the
artist, or, perhaps, to the expense of his time and labor which he
thought warranted by the payment he was to receive. But all express,
with sufficient fulness, the idea that Death is the common lot of
humanity, and that he enters with impartial feet the palace and the
cottage, neither pitying youth nor respecting age, and waiting no
convenient season.

The figure of Death in these strange religious works of Art,--for they
were as purely religious in their origin as the Holy Families and
Madonnas of the same and a subsequent period,--this figure of Death is
not always a skeleton. It is so in but one of the forty groups in the
Dance at Bâle, which was the germ of Holbein's, and which, indeed, until
very recently, was attributed to him, although it was painted more
than half a century before he was born. It is generally assumed that a
skeleton has always been the representative of Death, but erroneously;
for, in fact, Holbein was the first to fix upon a mere skeleton for the
embodiment of that idea.

The Hebrew Scriptures, which furnish us with the earliest extant
allusion to Death as a personage, designate him as an angel or messenger
of God,--as, for instance, in the record of the destruction of the
Assyrian host in the Second Book of Kings (xix. 35). The ancient
Egyptians, too, in whose strange system of symbolism may be found the
germ, at least, of most of the types used in the religion and the arts