exhibiting their own work, and telling an interested gathering of the wonders of other cities in days when the journey across the frontiers of one's own country was not to be safely or lightly undertaken. The elder Holbein would have introduced his son into the best artistic circles of his time and place; for although he does not seem to have been the leading artist of his city, he received important commissions from the religious houses, and the collection of sketches in the Berlin National Gallery shows how much the son owed to the father, and what a clever fellow the father was. PLATE IV.--JANE SEYMOUR (In the Imperial Gallery, Vienna) This portrait is one of the masterpieces of the Vienna Gallery. The queen is painted almost life size, and wears a dark red dress over a petticoat of silver brocade. The marvellous complexion for which she was noted and the fine jewels she wore are rendered with rare skill by the painter. [Illustration] Unfortunately history has nothing to tell us of the boyhood of young Hans, though we may gather that his father was in straitened circumstances and not on the best of terms with members of his family who were better off than he. Perhaps we may assume that the _res angusta domi_ turned young Han's steps from his father's house while he was yet little more than a boy, for when he could have been no more than seventeen, and was perhaps younger, he and his brother Ambrosius would seem to have left Augsburg for Basle, where so much of his work is to be found to-day. Here in his first youth he painted a rather poor Madonna and Christ, which was discovered little more than thirty years ago after centuries of neglect, and is remarkable chiefly for the tiny Renaissance cherubs on the frame, figures painted with so much freshness, ease, and vigour that one is inclined to overlook the poor quality of the picture they enshrine. It would seem that at the time when this work was painted the elder Holbein had taken his family from Augsburg to Lucerne, and that he was at once admitted to the Painters' Guild there. It was well for Holbein that he selected Basle as a place of residence, for the chances of his life threw him at a very impressionable age into the company of men who found a fresh field for his talents, and widened very considerably the scope of his achievement. He was not destined to remain constant to painting.