Keysler, a man of considerable learning and ingenuity, and the author of a very excellent book of travels, mentions the old painting at Basle, and adds, that "Holbein had also drawn and painted a Death's Dance, and had likewise painted, as it were, a _duplicate_ of this piece on another house, but which time has entirely obliterated."[92] We are here again left entirely in the dark as to the first mentioned painting, and its difference from the other. Charles Patin, an earlier authority than the two preceding travellers, and who was at Basle in 1671, informs us that strangers behold, with a considerable degree of pleasure, the walls of a house at the corner of a little street in the above town, which are covered from top to bottom with paintings by Holbein, that would have done honour to the commands of a great prince, whilst they are, in fact, nothing more than the painter's reward to the master of a tavern for some meals that he had obtained.[93] In the list of Holbein's works, in his edition of Erasmus's Moriæ encomion, he likewise mentions the painting on a house in the Eisengassen, or Iron-street, near the Rhine bridge, and for which he is said to have received forty florins,[94] perhaps the same as that mentioned in his travels. This painting was still remaining in the year 1730, when Mr. Breval saw it, and described it as a _dance of boors_, but in his opinion unworthy, as well as the Dance of Death in that city, of Holbein's hand.[95] These accounts of the paintings on houses are very obscure and contradictory, and the only way to reconcile them is by concluding that Holbein might have decorated the walls of some houses with a Dance of Death, and of others with a dance of peasants.[96] The latter subject would indeed be very much to the taste of an inn-keeper, and the nature of his occupation. Some of the writers on engraving have manifested their usual inaccuracy on the subject of Holbein's Dance of Peasants. Joubert says it has been engraved, but that it is "a peu près introuvable."[97] Huber likewise makes them extremely rare, and adds, without the slightest authority, that Holbein engraved them.[98] There is, however, no doubt that his beautiful pencil was employed on this subject in various ways, of which the following specimens are worthy of being recorded. 1. In a set of initial letters frequently used in books printed at Basle and elsewhere. 2. In an edition of Plutarch's works, printed by Cratander at Basle, 1530, folio, and afterwards introduced into Polydore Vergil's "Anglicæ historiæ libri viginti sex," printed at Basle, 1540, in folio, where, on p. 3 at bottom, the subject is very elegantly treated. It occurs also, in other books printed in the same city. 3. In an edition of the "Nugæ" of Nicolas Borbonius, Basle, 1540, 12mo. at p. 17, there is a dance of peasants replete with humour: and, 4. A vignette in the first page of an edition of Apicius, printed at Basle, 1541, 4to. without the printer's name.