The _Frontispiece_ represents the grim form of the spectral foe, his skeleton frame calmly seated on the globe, his grim jaw resting on his arm, and his elbow on his knees; at his feet is the hourglass he has borrowed from Time; he wears the crown, which indicates his universal sovereignty, and in his grasp is the dart which must touch all humanity in turn, and speed them hence. A pipe and tabor are suspended overhead, and bats are flitting above. Round the effigy of destruction are strewn the means wherewith his ends are wrought. A portly register, '_Death's Dance_,' is open; beside it are the symbolical instruments of his decrees--pistols, bullets, daggers, guns, dice, cards, the executioner's axe, a barrel of gunpowder, compounds, drugs, opium, arsenic, mercury, and the various fatal agencies arrayed against the natural preservation of life. A vignette on the engraved _Title-page_ further elucidates the uses of Death's pipe and tabor. The grim King is enjoying himself in his own fashion, dancing his rattling bones right merrily to his own music, which he is congenially piping forth in a cemetery; while the fatal hourglass and dart are laid aside upon the slab of a grave. Death's grim legions, the skeleton messengers of his decrees, are dancing fantastic figures with fiendish gaiety among the tombstones, performing ghastly quadrilles sufficient to scare an involuntary beholder out of his senses. Plate 1. _Time and Death._ Time and Death their thoughts impart, On works of Learning and of Art. The first scene, which we presume is simply introductory, and that Death and his comrade, old Time, have dropped in unprofessionally or as critics, represents two youthful students of the past. The apartment is surrounded with shelves, loaded with piles of busts and figures of the illustrious dead, the effigies of renowned poets, generals, philosophers, statesmen, and all classes of the community, from the earliest times, being presented indiscriminately. From these memorials the artist is sketching the portrait of a departed worthy. A literary gentleman, of a somewhat conventional type, with an open collar, a flowing dressing-gown, slippers, and general easy looseness of attire, having papers before him, and various manuscripts and ponderous volumes scattered around, is about, with a flourish of his quill, to record his impressions of the past; old Father Time, with his bald crown, and grey beard and spectacles on nose, is leaning on his scythe; while the grim King of Terrors is grinning by his side, curiously peering over the shoulders of the unconscious workers, and suggesting-- The time-worn burden of the song That Life is short--but Art is long. Plate 2. _The Antiquarian and Death._ Fungus, at length, contrives to get Death's Dart into his Cabinet.