As to Holbein's "Protestant sympathies"--using the name for the whole Lutheran movement in which Protestantism had its rise,--the assertions are even less grounded in fact, if that be possible. If he had it not already in his heart, through Erasmus and Amerbach and Froben and More and every other great influence to which he yielded himself at all, he early acquired a deep and devout sense of the need of reform _within_ the Church. Like all these lifelong friends, he wanted to see the Church of Rome return to her purer days and cast off the corruptions of a profligate idleness. Like them he couched his lance against the unworthy priest, the gluttonous or licentious monk, the wolves in sheep's clothing that were destroying the fold from within. Like them, as they re-echoed Colet--the saintly Dean of St. Paul's,--he passionately favoured the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular and placing them in the hands, or at any rate bringing them to the familiar knowledge, of peasant as well as prelate. But surely one must know very little of the teachings of the stoutest Churchmen of Holbein's day and acquaintance not to know also that they encouraged if they did not plant these opinions in his mind. "Duerer's woodcuts and engravings, especially his various scenes from the Passion," writes even Woltmann, the biographer to whom every student of Holbein owes so grateful a debt, "had prepared the soil among the people for Luther's translation of the Bible. Holbein's pictures from the Old Testament followed in their wake, and helped forward the work." Yet it seems difficult to suppose that Woltmann could have been ignorant of the facts of the case. So far were Holbein's, or any other artist's, Bible illustrations or Bible pictures from arguing a "Lutheran" monopoly in the vernacular Bible, that in Germany alone there were fifteen translated and illustrated editions of the Bible before Luther's appeared; and of these fifteen some half-dozen were published before Luther was born. Quentell, at Cologne, for instance, published a famous translation with exceedingly good woodcuts in 1480,--three years before Luther's birth. While some nine years before Quentell's German translation, the Abbot Niccolo Malermi published his _Biblia Vulgare_ in the Italian vernacular, which went through twenty editions in less than a century: one of which,--brought out at Venice in 1490 by the Giunta Brothers,--was illustrated by woodcuts of the greatest beauty. So widespread was the demand for this "Malermi Bible" that another edition, with new illustrations of almost equal merit, was produced at Venice in 1493, by the printer known as _Anima Mia_. All of these were vernacular Bibles; all illustrated; all widely known throughout Italy and Germany before Holbein was born or Luther was in his tenth year. And certainly it has not yet been suggested by the most rabid Protestantism that either these or any of the many other illustrated vernacular Bibles