These lines, no doubt, were composed by Erasmus himself in praise of the artist. Traces of further inscriptions, now undecipherable, are to be seen on the edges of the other books. This work shows an extraordinary advance in Holbein’s powers as a portrait-painter when compared with even so fine a work as the “Bonifacius Amerbach,” painted four years earlier. The modelling of both head and hands is searching in its truth, and he rarely accomplished anything more perfect in the subtlety of its delineation of character, and in a realism without exaggeration or hardness of detail. We see the “little old man,” as Dürer described him when he met him in Brussels some years earlier, just as he was in reality, the marks of age on his strongly-lined face, and about the eyes something of the tired look of the scholar and bookman, but the face still stamped with mental energy, and a calm, tolerant, and dignified outlook on life. A faint smile lights up his features, as though satisfied both with his own accomplished work and with the world in which he was living. For penetrating insight, indeed, this portrait is almost unsurpassed. It shows that side of the character of Erasmus which is displayed in his familiar letters to friends, in his _Praise of Folly_, and his _Colloquies_, a gentle, genial sense of humour which sweetened his intercourse with his fellows.[384] A sheet in the Print Room of the Louvre contains a slight, almost obliterated, study for the head in this picture, but full face, and a masterly drawing for the right hand, full of character;[385] a second contains two studies of the left hand, and one of the right hand holding the pen in the Louvre portrait (Pl. 55).[386] In the catalogue of the Meade sale it was stated that the picture had been at one time in the Arundel Collection.[387] VOL. I., PLATE 54. [Illustration: ERASMUS 1523 _From the picture in the collection of the Earl of Radnor at Longford Castle_ ] [Sidenote: THE LONGFORD CASTLE “ERASMUS”]