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The Dance of Death.

account of the Basle paintings ascribed to Holbein ; andthat of the Dance of Death has not only been placed byseveral writers on the walls, inside and outside, of houses,but likewise in the fish-market; on the walls of the church-yard of St. Peter; and even in the cathedral itself of Basle ;and, therefore, amidst this chaos of description, it is abso-lutely impossible to arrive at any conclusion that can bedeemed in any degree satisfactory.

We are now to enter upon the investigation of a workwhich has been somewhat erroneously denominated a"Dance of Death," by most of the writers who havementioned it. Such a title, however, is not to be found inany of its numerous editions. It is certainly not a dance,but rather, with slight exception, a series of admirablegroups of persons of various characters, among whomDeath is appropriately introduced as an emblem of man'smortality. It is of equal celebrity with the Macaber Dance,but in design and execution of considerable superiority,and with which the name of Hans Holbein has been sointimately connected, and that great painter so generallyconsidered as its inventor, that even to doubt his claim toit will seem quite heretical to those who may have foundedtheir opinion on internal evidence with respect to his styleof composition.

In the year 1538 there appeared a work with the fol-lowing title, " Les simulachres et historiees faces de la mort,autant elegamment pourtraictes, que artificiellement imagi-nees." A Lyon Soubz lescu de Coloigne, 4to. and at theend, " Excudebant Lugduni Melchior et Gaspar Trechselfratres, 1538." It has forty-one cuts, most exquisitely de-signed and engraved on wood, in a manner which severalmodern artists only of England and Germany have beencompetent to rival. As to the designs of these truly elegantprints, no one who is at all skilled in the knowledge ofHolbein's style and manner of grouping his figures, wouldhesitate immediately to ascribe them to that artist. Somepersons have imagined that they had actually discoveredthe portrait of Holbein in the subject of the nun and herlover \ but the painter, whoever he may have been, is morelikely to be represented in the last cut as one of the sup-porters of the escutcheon of Death. In these designsj