If Erasmus was the typical scholar of that age which stood between the Renaissance and the Reformation, Hans Holbein was typical of its art. In his hand painting has come down from its high estate, its Madonnas and its great Doges, its classic pageants and its heroic legends, and treats of common life as men saw it every day. The German artist descended from the lofty themes which had inspired the great master of Italy, and took even the humbler work of illustrating books. Botticelli, it is true, had drawn studies of the _Divina Commedia_, but Holbein was ready to work for a printer, and to design letters and tail-pieces for the _Libelli_ of his friends. It was through Froben, the great Basle painter, no doubt, that More and Erasmus and Holbein first came together. Holbein illustrated the _Utopia_, and came to England with an introduction from the author of the _Encomium Moriæ_. He was thirty years younger than the Dutch scholar, and twenty years younger than More, but they became his chiefest friends. He tarried some while in More's house, and it was there that he drew some of those marvellous sketches now preserved at Windsor, that give us our truest knowledge of the Court of Henry VIII. Fisher and Warham, the Earl of Surrey and Sir Nicholas Poins, Colet and Godsalve, each in their way representative of a class, but keenly individual and vigorously characteristic, are preserved for us by those few sharp, bold strokes with a power and reality which no portrait-painter has ever surpassed. The luxury and the meanness, the treachery and the cold selfishness, that form the background of the great struggles of the sixteenth century are expressed for all time in those master-sketches which Holbein drew and Margaret Roper, it may be, often looked upon. And for More's own household we have, besides the letters and the memoirs, the very form and pressure from the great artist's own hand. The original design for the famous picture of the patriarchal family, the three generations living together in love and reverence in their "Platonic Academy," is at Basle; but in England, at Nostell and at Cokethorpe, we have very fair presentments of the great picture as it must have been. More sits by his shrewd old father in his habit as he lived. The gentle, delicate son stands by, book in hand, and near his affianced bride. The stepmother sits stately at one side of the group, and the daughters cluster around. The sorrowful eyes of the great Chancellor, and his pensive, meditative brow, speaking sound conscience and a firm resolve, are not lightly to be forgotten; and the plain, homely face of Margaret Roper, refined and thoughtful through all its solid strength, may well linger in the memories of those who know her beautiful life.