Doubts have arisen whether the above can be regarded as the first edition of these justly celebrated engravings in the form of a volume accompanied with text. In the "Notices sur les graveurs," Besançon, 1807, 8vo. a work ascribed to M. Malpé,[99] it is stated to have been originally published at Basle in 1530; and in M. Jansen's "Essai sur l'origine de la gravure," &c. Paris, 1808, 8vo. a work replete with plagiarisms, and the most glaring mistakes, the same assertion is repeated. This writer adds, but unsupported by any authority, that soon afterwards another edition appeared with Flemish verses. Both these authors, following their blind leader Papillon, have not ventured to state that they ever saw this supposed edition of 1530, and it may indeed be asked, who has? Or in what catalogue of any library is it recorded? Malpé acknowledges that the earliest edition he had seen was that of 1538. M. Fuseli, in his edition of Pilkington's Dictionary of Painters, has appended a note to the article for Hans Holbein, where, alluding perhaps to the former edition of the present dissertation, he remarks, that "Holbein's title to the Dance of Death would not have been called in question, had the ingenious author of the dissertation on that subject been acquainted with the German edition." This gentleman seems, however, to have inadvertently forgotten a former opinion which he had given in one of his lectures, where he says, "The scrupulous precision, the high finish, and the Titianesque colour of Hans Holbein would make the least part of his excellence, if his right to that series of emblematic groups known under the name of Holbein's Dance of Death had not, of late, been too successfully disputed." M. Fuseli would have rendered some service to this question by favouring us with an explicit account of the above German edition, if he really intended by it a complete work; but it is most likely that he adverted to some separate impressions of the cuts with printed inscriptions on them, but which are only the titles of the respective characters or subjects. To such impressions M. Malpé has certainly referred, adding that they have, at top, passages from the Bible in German, and verses at bottom in the same language. Jansen follows him as to the verses at bottom only. Now, on forty-one of these separate impressions, in the collection of the accurate and laborious author of the best work on the origin and early history of engraving that has ever appeared, and on several others in the present writer's possession, neither texts of scripture, nor verses at bottom, are to be found, and nothing more than the above-mentioned German titles of the characters. M. Huber, in his "Manuel des curieux et des amateurs de l'art," vol. i. p. 155, after inaccurately stating that Holbein _engraved_ these cuts, proceeds to observe, that in order to form a proper judgment of their merit, it is necessary to see the earliest impressions, printed