Had Mr. Hegner written with a becoming diffidence in his opinions, his work might have commanded and deserved respect, though greatly abounding in error and false conceit. He has undertaken a task for which he has shown himself wholly unqualified, and with much unseemly arrogance, and its usual concomitant, ignorance, has assumed to himself a monopoly of information on the subject which he discusses. His arguments, if worthy of the name, are, generally speaking, of a most weak and flimsy texture. In support of his dogmatical opinion that the original designs for the Lyons Dance of Death exclusively belong to Holbein he has not adduced a single fact. He has not been in possession of a tenth part of the materials that were necessary for the proper investigation of his subject, nor does he appear to have even seen them. The very best judges of whatever relates to the history and art of engraving are quite satisfied that most of the persons who have written on them, with the exception of Mr. Ottley, and of the modest and urbane Monsieur Peignot, are liable to the charge of extreme inaccuracy and imperfection in their treatment of the Dance of Death, and the list of such writers may now be closed with the addition of Herr Hegner. Some of his positions are now to be stated and examined. He makes Holbein the author of a new Dance of Death in the Crozat or Gallitzin drawings in Indian ink which have been already described in the present dissertation, adding that he also _engraved_ them, and suppressing any mention in this place of the monogram on one of the cuts which he _elsewhere admits not to belong to Holbein_. Soon afterwards, and with very good reason, he doubts the originality of the drawings, which he says M. de Mechel caused to be copied by Rudolph Schellenberg, a skilful artist, already mentioned as the author of a Dance of Death of his own invention; and proceeds to state, that from these copies De Mechel employed some inferior persons in his service to make engravings; advancing all this without the accompaniment of any proof whatever, and in direct contradiction to De Mechel's authority of having himself engraved them. An apparently bitter enemy to De Mechel, whose posthumous materials, now in the library at Basle, he nevertheless admits to have used for his work, he invidiously enlarges on the discrepancies between his engravings and the Lyons wood-cuts, both in size and manner; and then concludes that they were copied from the wood-cuts, the copyist allowing himself the privilege of making arbitrary variations, especially in the figure of the Eve in the second cut, which, he says, is of the family of Boucher, who, in spite of Hegner's opinion, is regarded by better judges as a clever painter. Whether the remarks on any deviations of De Mechel's prints from the Crozat drawings are just or otherwise can now be decided by comparison only, and Hegner does not appear to have seen them, or at least does not tell us so.