those whose days he is about to cut short. He comes always as a mocker, and the prevailing note of the whole series is one of irony. The first four cuts form, as it were, a preface to the actual “Dance of Death” which follows. The first of all represents the Creation. The Almighty bends over Adam, who lies asleep on a small island amid the waters, and draws Eve from his side. Then comes one of Adam and Eve in Paradise. The serpent, with human head, is twined round the branches of the tree, beneath which Adam is reaching up to pluck the fruit, while Eve is seated below, leaning against a rock. All around them, as in the first sheet, are animals—a stag, a sheep, a goat, a dog, a monkey, a rabbit, a hedgehog, a lizard, and so on—while in the branches of the beautifully drawn tree are a number of birds. The third cut represents the Expulsion from Paradise, with the angel with the flaming sword flying in a cloud over the heads of the guilty couple. In this cut Death makes his first appearance. Playing upon his viol, he leads the way, dancing as he goes. This is one of the few instances throughout the set in which Holbein has so represented Death; in most of the illustrations he does not follow at all closely the earlier wall-paintings, in which the living and the dead are shown dancing together. In the next scene Adam is at work clearing the rough ground, with Death at his side helping him to uproot a tree, and Eve seated, half naked, in the background, suckling her child, her distaff held across one arm. This is followed by a design headed in the proof impressions “Gebeyn aller Menschen” (Bones of all Men), a crowd of skeletons in front of a charnel-house, with drums, trumpets, and other musical instruments, as though forming the orchestra which is to provide the music for the play which is about to follow. Some wear fantastic head-dresses, and their winding-sheets still hang around them in tatters. [Sidenote: THE EMPEROR, AND OTHERS]