And the greatest pages of his autobiography, written with his brush, will be only so many childish rebuses if we forget what astounding pages of History and Argument were turned before him. In Augsburg he had seen the Emperor Maximilian riding in state more than once, and heard much talk about that Emperor's interests and schemes and fears; and of thrones and battlefields engaged with or against these. Augsburg was in closest ties of commerce with Venice; and the tides of many a tremendous issue of civilisation rolled to and fro through the gates of the Free Swabian City. Child and lad, his was a precocious intelligence; and it had been fed upon meat for strong men. He had heard of Alexander VI.'s colossal infamies, and those of Caesar Borgia as well; and of the kingdoms ranging to this or that standard after the death of Pope and Prince. He was nine years old then. Old enough, too, to drink in the wonderful hero-tales of one Christopher Columbus of Genoa, whose fame was running through the Whispering Gallery of Europe, while he himself lay dying at Valladolid--ill, heartbroken, poor, disgraced,--yet proudly confident that he had demonstrated, past all denial, the truth of his own conviction, and touched the shores of Cathay, sailing westward from Spain. Da Gama, Vespucci, Balboa, Magellan,--theirs were indeed names and deeds to set the heart of youth leaping, between its cradle and its twenty-fifth year. Holbein was twelve when Augsburg heard that England had a young king, whom it crowned as Henry VIII. He was setting out from his home, such as it was, to fight his own boyish battle of Life, when the news spread of Flodden's Field. None of these things would let such an one as he was rest content to apprehend them as a yokel. From either the honest dominie of the Signboard or some other, we may be sure he sought the means to read and digest them for himself. And if he learnt some smattering of the geography of the earth and the heavens after the crude notions of an older day, he could have done no other, at that time, in the most enlightened Universities. Ptolemy's _Geographia_ was still the text-book, and the so-called "Ptolemaic Theory" still the astronomical creed of scholars. Copernicus was, indeed, a man of forty when Holbein was painting this Signboard in 1516. But Copernicus was still interluding the active duties of Frauenburg's highly successful governor, tax-collector, judge, and vicar-general,--to say nothing of his brilliant essays on finance,--with those studies in his watch-tower which were to revolutionise the astronomical conceptions of twenty centuries and wheel the Earth around the Sun instead of the Sun around the Earth. But his system was not actually published until its author was on his death-bed, in the year of Holbein's own death. So that these stupendous new ideas were only the unpublished rumours and discussions of circles like that of Froben and Erasmus, when Holbein first entered it.