But work, which always spelt happiness to Memlinc, meant something more to him in this decade of his career. Death in 1487 robbed him of his wife. One pictures to oneself the bereaved artist seeking solace from the grief of his widowed home in intensified application to his art. The refining discipline of sorrow was exercising its softening influence on a nature of whose religious fervour and deep piety his life-work is an abiding testimony. Absorbed in the production of the Shrine of Saint Ursula, does not the instinct of human sympathy suggest to us the artist spending himself in this inimitable work for a monument of his love worthy of the memory of the helpmate who had devoted her life to enhance the happiness of his own, herein seeking and finding surcease of the sorrow that now overshadowed his life, the burden of work balancing the burden of grief? And what a monument! So familiar is the legend and the unique interpretation of it he has left us, one feels it would be a work of supererogation to dwell on the story. But the treatment, viewed by the light of Memlinc’s bereavement, discloses fresh beauties in every panel. Critics have dwelt on the unreality of the death scenes in this shrine. Memlinc, as we have had sufficient occasion to observe, shrank from the painful expounding of evil. But for him death had no terrors: it was but the passing over to the ineffable reward of a well-spent life, and this innate feeling he conveys to us in the placid acceptance of death by Saint Ursula and her virgin band as but a stepping across the threshold to everlasting bliss. These critics, on the contrary, look for the betrayal of fear and anguish, for the manifestation of human suffering: but, like the martyrs of the early Church, we find these victims of the ruthless Huns not alone meeting their death in a spirit of resignation, but welcoming it with abounding peace and a joyful self-surrender, strong in the hope and faith of the hereafter: as the artist himself was wistfully looking forward to the day and the hour that would reunite him there to the one he had loved best on earth.