The forty-seventh composition is one which has puzzled the critics and antiquaries; but it is not easy to conjecture why. It shows us a wretched Beggar, naked, sick, lame,--utterly destitute, miserable, and forsaken,--suffering at once all the ills that flesh is heir to. He sits huddled together on some straw, near a large building, and lifts his hands and face up piteously to heaven. Death is not there; and the antiquaries ask in wonder, Why is the subject introduced? Why, but to show that to him alone who would gladly welcome Death, Death will not come? The work ends, as a connected series, with the Last Judgment, where Christ, who conquered Death, appears seated on the bow of promise,--with his feet resting on a celestial sphere, attended by angels, and showing to a throng of those who have risen from the grave the wounds by which he redeemed them from its power. To this is added an ornamental tail-piece called Death's Arms. It shows a skull in a battered shield, which has for a crest a regal helmet surmounted by an hour-glass and two bony arms grasping a stone. The supporters to the shield are a gentleman and lady richly dressed,--said to represent Holbein and his wife. It is not known, positively, when Holbein drew these designs upon the blocks (for of course he did not engrave them); and it has even been disputed by one or two eminent antiquarian critics, that he designed them at all. But there does not appear to be a single valid reason for thus diminishing his fame. He probably was engaged on them between 1531, the date of his first return to Bâle, and 1538, when they were published,--the year in which he refused the solicitation of his townsmen to return to the home of his childhood and the bosom of his family. Holbein continued to live in London until the year 1554, when that city suffered a visitation of the plague, similar to that which was the occasion of the painting of the Great Dance of Death at Bâle. Holbein was struck by the disease; and Death, knowing gratitude as little as remorse, triumphed over him who had blazoned his triumphs. Upon the painter's fame, however, and that of his great work, Death could not lay his hand; but so long as the grim tyrant shall claim his victims, so long will he perpetuate the memory of Hans Holbein. Though he was a royal favorite, it is not known where he died; and the place where lie the ashes of him who, on a king's word, was greater than seven earls, is equally unknown; there is not a line or a stone to mark it. So soon after his death as in the reign of Charles I., (within one hundred years,) a nobleman--noble by nature as well as by birth--desirous of erecting a monument to him, sought his grave, but in vain, and was compelled to abandon his design. And thus was Holbein driven to live among strangers, to die without a wife to console or children to mourn him, and to lay his bones in a nameless grave in a foreign land.