The earliest French translator was John Lefevre, an ecclesiastic, born at Dijon in 1493,—_Les Emblemes de Maistre Andre Alciat_: Paris, 1536. He was secretary to Cardinal Givry, whose protection he enjoyed, and died in 1565. Bartholomew Aneau, himself an emblematist, was the next translator into French, 1549; and a third, Claude Mignault, appeared in 1583. Wolfgang Hunger, a Bavarian, in 1542,[51] and Jeremiah Held of Nördlingen, were the German translators; Bernardino Daza Pinciano, in 1549, _Los Emblemas de Alciato_, was the Spanish; and Giovanni Marquale, in 1547, the Italian,—_Diverse Imprese_. The notes and comments upon Alciat’s Emblems manifest great research and very extensive learning. Sebastian Stockhamer supplied _commentariola_, short comments, to the Lyons edition of 1556. Francis Sanctius, or Sanchez, one of the restorers of literature in Spain, born in 1523, also added _commentaria_ to the Lyons edition of 1573. Above all we must name Claude Mignault, whose praise is that “to a varied learning he joined a rare integrity.” He was born near Dijon about 1536, and died in 1606. His comments in full appeared in Plantin’s[52] Antwerp edition, 8vo, of 1573, and may be appealed to in proof of much patient research and extensive erudition. Lorenzo Pignoria, born at Padua in 1571, and celebrated for his study of Egyptian antiquities, also compiled notes on Alciat’s Emblems in MDCXIIX.[53] The results of the labours of the three, Sanchez, Mignault, and Pignorius, were collected in the Padua editions of 1621 and 1661. It is scarcely possible that so many editions should have issued from the press, and so much learning have been bestowed, without the knowledge of Alciat’s Emblems having penetrated every nook and corner of the literary world. With a glance only at the “PROGNOSTICATIO,” of Theophrastus Paracelsus, the alchemist and enthusiast, written in 1536, and expressed in thirty-two copperplates, we pass at once to the _Dance of Death_, by Hans Holbein, which Bewick, 1789, and Douce, 1833, in London, and Schlotthauer and Fortoul, 1832, in Munich and Paris, have made familiar to English, German, and French readers. Of Holbein himself, it is sufficient here to say that he was born at Bâle in 1495, and died in London in 1543.