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 upon one side with the figures of a youth and maiden before a mirror of their loveliness, and, upon the reverse, with Death holding his spade beside the worm-pierced corpse; it was the type of mediæval Christian teaching. The fear of death was the recurring burden of the pulpit; it made the heart of every bowed worshipper tremble, and was taught with fearful distinctness by the pestilence that again and again suddenly struck the populations of Europe. The chord of feeling was overstrained; the elastic force of life asserted itself, and, by a strange transformation, men made a jest of their terror, and played with death as they have never since done; they acted the ravages of death in pantomime, made the tragedy comic, put the figure of Death into their carnivals, and changed the object of their alarm into the theme of their sport. In the spirit of that democracy which, in spite of the aristocratic structure of mediæval society, was imbedded in the heart of the Christian system, where every soul was of equal value before God, the people turned the universal moral lesson of death into a satire against the great; Death was not only the common executioner, he arrested the prelates and the nobles, stripped them of their robes and their possessions, and tried them whether they were of God or Mammon. In these many-varied forms of terror, sport, and irony Death filled the imagination and reflection of the age; the shrouded figure or the naked skeleton was seen on the stage of the theatre, amid the games of the people, on the walls of the churches and the monasteries, throughout the whole range of art and literature. Holbein had looked on many representations of this idea: where, as in Dürer’s work, Death attends knight and beggar; or where, as in the Nuremberg Chronicle, the skeletons dance by the open grave; or where, as in the