For reasons already mentioned a number of suggestions, more or less improbable, have been made as to the inner meaning of the painting. It has been suggested that it is a votive picture to commemorate the recovery of a sick child. This idea is carried still further by others, who say that the infant in the Madonna’s arms is the soul of a dead child, while a third interpretation is that it [Illustration: _Hanfstängl photo._] [_National Gallery._ THE AMBASSADORS.] is the soul of the woman kneeling next to the Virgin, who is supposed to have recently died. Other explanations have been given, but they are all sentimental refinements of modern German criticism, first voiced by Tieck and Schlegel, which might not have occurred to them if they had studied the original instead of the copy. Ruskin was on the side of the sentimentalists. He says (_Cornhill Magazine_, 1860): “The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father and mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child. She appears to them, her own Child in her arms. She puts down her Christ before them, takes their child into her arms instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hands to its father and mother, saying farewell.” The simplest explanation, and the most probable, is that it is merely an ordinary picture of Virgin and Child with the donors in adoration, and it is splendid enough in its simplicity without the need of any refined subtleties added to it by Teutonic sentimentalists. * * * * * The picture popularly known as _The Ambassadors_, formerly in the collection of the Earl of Radnor at Longford Castle, was purchased for the nation in 1890. Until that year the left-hand figure was always supposed to represent Sir Thomas Wyatt, poet and diplomatist, and his companion some unknown friend and fellow Ambassador, who, Dr. Woltmann suggested, was John Leland. When the picture was first exhibited in the National Gallery many suggestions were made as to their real identity, the most important being that of Mr. W. F. Dickes, who wrote several long articles to prove that they were the German Counts Palatine Otto Henry and his brother Philip, and that the picture represented “The Nuremberg Treaty of Religious Freedom between the Catholics and Protestants.” Happily, the matter was settled in 1895 by Miss Mary F. S. Hervey, who discovered documentary evidence of so exact a kind that no doubt remains that the portraits are those of Jean de Dinteville, seigneur de Polizy, bailly de Troyes, and a knight of the French Order of St. Michael, and his friend, George de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur. Mr. Dickes, however, has recently returned to the charge (1901), doubts the evidence, and still pins his faith to his Counts Palatine.