In Mr. Huth's oil portrait More is wearing a dark-green coat trimmed with fur, and showing the purple sleeves of his doublet beneath. His eyes are grey-blue. He never wore a beard, made the fashion by Henry VIII. at the same time that the head was "polled,"--a singularly ugly combination,--until he was in the Tower and grew that beard which he smilingly swept away from the path of the executioner's axe. "It," he said with astonishing self-possession, could be "accused of no treason." In 1527, however, no shadow of tragedy seemed possible unless the suspicion of it slept in More's own heart when he said to his son-in-law, in answer to some flattering congratulation on the King's favour, "Son Roper, if my head could win him a castle in France, my head should fall." But for these superb drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor, we should know nothing at all of many a portrait Holbein painted--all among the immediate friends of More and Erasmus on this first visit to England; nor, for that matter, of many a portrait painted in later years. And how little these can be trusted to tell the whole tale of achievement is shown by the fact that they include no studies for a number of oil paintings that are still in existence. Illustration: PLATE 21 JOHN FISHER, BISHOP OF ROCHESTER _Chalks. Windsor Castle_ Of the drawings which represent a lost painting, there is a noble one of Bishop Fisher, whose execution preceded More's by only a few weeks. A literally venerable head it was (Plate 21), to be the shuttlecock of papal defiance and royal determination not to be defied with impunity. For assuredly if the life of the Bishop of Rochester hung in the balance, as it did, in May, 1535, it was Paul III.'s mad effrontery in making him a Cardinal while he was actually in the Tower under his sovereign's displeasure which heated the King's anger to white-hot brutality. "Let the Pope send him a hat," he thundered, "but I will so provide that he shall wear it on his shoulders, for head he shall have none to set it on!" And on the 17th of that June he made good the savage oath. Yet the painter, after all, has been more potent than the King. For here lives Fisher. Bishop or Cardinal this is the man, as More loved him. A striking and richly painted oil portrait of Erasmus's "Maecenas," Archbishop Warham, is in the Louvre; of which there are a number of copies, as well as a replica, at Lambeth Palace. The latter was exhibited at Manchester in 1857. The study for these portraits is among the Windsor drawings. The painting in the Louvre has more vividness in the carnations, and the impasto is thicker than at Lambeth; otherwise the two are identical. But for myself I find a more seizing quality in the chalk drawing than in either. There is something in its sunken fading eyes that speaks of the majesty of office as well as its burdens.