Altogether apart from their artistic merits, these drawings of Holbein’s are of the utmost historical value, both on account of their number, including as they do so many of the leading characters who played a part in the making of England in Tudor days, and also because of the perfection of their draughtsmanship and the corresponding life-likeness of their portraiture, so that they form true documents in every sense of the word. Holbein’s genius shows us Henry’s ministers and the lords and ladies who surrounded him, just as they were in life, without any attempt at flattery, but with every feature set down with unfaltering truth, and, above all, with a grasp of character which the portrait drawings of no other great master of his period show in the same degree. He has left behind, as a mine of wealth for the use of the student of history, in drawings alone, without taking into account his numerous painted portraits for which no drawings now exist, a series of more than one hundred representations of Tudor men and women. In only one other instance can we turn to a similar series of contemporary portraits—the chalk drawings of French men and women of the same century by the two Clouets, Jean and François, father and son. These, though of the utmost value as historical portraiture, and also of great beauty and even fascination as works of art, fall short of the greatness which stamps Holbein’s work of a like nature. The elder Clouet had not his mastery of drawing; his knowledge was more limited and his means more restricted. His drawings have “a stiffness and dryness which are very far from the flowing and supple handling of the Basle master.”[606] His son had considerably more science. “His drawing in reality is extremely profound, and as exactly calculated as any known. In tracing the human face and all the parts presented by the model, he has the ability of a specialist, whose long practice of an art that is deep rather than wide has enabled him to accumulate a mass of information and experience. He reaches perfection in the proportion of the features, in the exact placing of all the fine fugitive, mobile parts of the face, in the careful study of the extremely subtle relations from which the mass of form draws its solidity, and in skill in constructing the unity of impression of a face and of a type.”[607] He has little or nothing, however, of Holbein’s beauty of style. Holbein’s drawings are matchless in the delicacy of their modelling, every little depression or prominence in the contours of the face being indicated with an exactitude and a simplicity of means unrivalled in work of such nature; and also for the way in which this delicacy of touch in handling the crayon, and subtlety and precision of the strengthening lines with brush or pencil, are combined with the wonderful vigour and sense of life with which each individual drawing is filled. Added to their truthfulness in