His miniatures are now of the greatest rarity, though there are many in various English collections which still wrongfully bear his name, given to them in less critical days, when every portrait, great and small, dating from Tudor times, was ascribed to him. In certain of these, very possibly Holbein’s original handiwork has been buried beneath repairs and repaints by later and less skilful hands. No doubt a number of others have been lost, for so delicate and small an object of art as a miniature is soon damaged or mislaid; though against this must be set the fact that many of them were kept in specially-made ivory boxes, and so would not easily suffer destruction. The number of them which, from the perfection of their execution, can be said with some approach to certainty to be from his brush, can be counted almost on the fingers of one’s hands. These include the portraits of Mrs. Pemberton; the two sons of the Duke of Suffolk, Henry and Charles Brandon; Lady Audley; Queen Catherine Howard; Sir Thomas More; the portrait of an unknown youth in the Queen of Holland’s collection; several of the painter himself, done in the last year of his life, and two or three others. After these come several which, though less perfect in draughtsmanship, have serious claims to be considered as his work, and after these, again, there are those fairly numerous examples which, though of good execution and of real interest and value, have no pretensions to rank as works of the great master. Some of these have been attributed tentatively to such painters as the Hornebolts, Livina Teerlinc, Stretes, or Bettes, though modern criticism has not succeeded as yet in disentangling the works of these little masters the one from the other, so that the various attributions are at present more or less mere guesswork. [Sidenote: MINIATURES OF SIR THOMAS MORE]