The events which made Dürer an ardent Evangelical and Reformer in a coarser paste proved a leaven of anarchy and subversion. Young, hot-headed nobles like Ulrich Von Hutten became iconoclastic, were foremost at the dispersion of convents and nunneries, often playing a part on such occasions that was anything but a credit to the cause they were championing. Among the prentice lads and among the peasants, the unrest, discontent, and appetite for change took forms if not more offensive at least more alarming. The Peasants' War gave rulers a foretaste of the panic they were to undergo at the time of the French Revolution. And in the towns men like "the three godless painters" made the burghers shake in their shoes for the social order which kept them rich and respected and others poor and servile. It is strange that all three should have come from Dürer's workshop. Probably they were the most talented prentices of the craft, since the great master chose them: besides, painting was an occupation which allowed of a certain intellectual development. They may have often listened with hungry ears to disputes between Pirkheimer and Dürer, and envied the good luck, grace and gift which had enabled the latter to bridge over a gulf as great as that which separated them from him, between him and Pirkheimer or Vambüler. All this and much more we can by taking thought imagine to our satisfaction; but the point which we would most desire to satisfactorily conjecture we are utterly in the dark about. Though his prentices were tried, Dürer appeared neither for nor against them; nor can we help ourselves to understand a fact so strange by any other mention of his attitude. He had a year or two previously married his servant, (perhaps the girl that his wife took with her to the Netherlands), to Georg Penz, who went the farthest in his scepticism, recanted soonest, and possessed least talent of the three. But this fact, which is not quite assured, narrows the grounds of conjecture but little; we still face an almost boundless blank. It is difficult to imagine that Dürer was quite as shocked as the Town Council by a man who said "he had some idea that there was a God, but did not know rightly what conception to form of him," who was so unfortunate as to think "nothing" of Christ, and could not believe in the Holy Gospel or in the word of God; and who failed to recognise "a master of himself, his goods and everything belonging to him" in the Council of Nuremberg. Now-a-days, when we think of the licence of assertion that has obtained on these questions, we are inclined to admire the honesty and intellectual clarity of such a confession. And Dürer, who resolved the similar question of authority as to "things beautiful" in a manner much the same as this, may, we can at least hope, have viewed his prentices with more of pity than of anger. All the three "godless painters" were banished from reformed Nuremberg; but Georg, whose confession had been