It is impossible to say which of the two portraits of 1523 is the earlier in date. No doubt the preliminary drawings for both were made in the little room or study in which the scholar sat daily at work upon his own writings, or supervising the publication and correcting the proofs of other volumes issued by Froben, for whom he was then acting as a kind of editor-in-chief. In the Longford Castle example (Pl. 54)[382] Holbein has shown his sitter to the waist, turned to the left, the face seen in three-quarters. He is wearing his invariable dress of black lined with sable, and over it a dark cloak trimmed with black fur, and a black doctor’s cap over his grey hair. He gazes in front of him, with a half-smile in his blue eyes and on his fine, sensitive mouth. His hands rest on a red book placed on the table before him, on the gilt edges of which is inscribed, partly in Greek and partly in Latin characters, “ἩΡΑΚΛΕΙΟΙ ΠΟΝΟΙ ERASMI ROTERO—” (The Herculean labours of Erasmus of Rotterdam)—the end of the last word being hidden by the sable cuff of the cloak. The background shows on the left a flat, richly-ornamented pillar and capital of Renaissance design, and on the right a green curtain hung from a rod by rings, partly drawn aside, and revealing a shelf on which are three books and a glass water-bottle. On the cover of the book which leans against the latter is the date “MDXXIII.,” and on the edge of the same volume is a damaged couplet in Latin, now partly defaced, which J. Mähly, after supplying several missing words, read as follows:— “Ille ego Joannes Holbein, en, non facile ullus. Tam mihi mimus erit quam mihi momus erat.”[383]