bets of which are ascribed to him; they represent the pastimes and sports of the country, just as Holbein may have seen them at any time upon the way-side, and are full of heartiness, humor, and reality. The sketches from the life of boys and children are especially graceful and charming, and reveal an ease and power in delineation which has seldom been rivalled. This species of genre art, which had first made its appearance in wood-engraving, because it was considered beneath the dignity of the higher arts, was very popular; by his work of this sort Holbein contributed to the pleasure of the people, just as by his co-operation with the Humanists and the Reformers he served them in more important ways. Finally he produced at Bâsle his two great works in wood-engraving, the Dance of Death and the Figures of the Bible, which are the highest achievements of the art at any time.
The Dance of Death was an old subject. It had possessed for centuries a powerful and sometimes morbid attraction for the artistic imagination and for popular reflection. It was peculiarly the product of mediæval Christian life, and survives as a representative of the great mediæval ideas. That age first surrounded death with terrors, fastened the attention of man continually upon his doom, and affrighted his spirit with the dread of that unknown hour of his dissolution which should put him in danger of the second death of immortal agony. In Greece death had been the breaking of the chrysalis by the winged butterfly, or, at least, only the extinction of the torch; here it was the gaunt and grinning skeleton always jostling the flesh of the living, however beautiful or joyous they might be. In the churches of the thirteenth century there swung a banner emblazoned
