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The Dance of Death.

pious, quaint, and jingling address to Jeanne de Touszele,Abbess of the convent of St. Peter, at Lyons, in which theauthor, whose name is obscurely stated to be Ouzele, com-pliments the good lady as the pattern of true religion, fromher intimate acquaintance with the nature of Death, rushing,as it were, into his hands, by her entrance into the sepulchreof a cloister. He enlarges on the various modes of repre-senting the mortality of human nature, and contends thatthe image of Death has nothing terrific in the eyes of theChristian. He maintains that there is no better method ofdepicting mortality than by a dead person, especially bythose images which so frequently occur on sepulchral mo-numents. Adverting then to the figures in the presentwork, he regrets the death of him who has here conceived[imaginS] such elegant designs, greatly exceeding all otherpatterns of the kind, in like manner as the paintings of Apellesand Zeuxis have surpassed those of modern times. He ob-serves that these funereal histories, accompanied by theirgrave descriptions in rhyme, induce the admiring spectatorsto behold the dead as alive, and the living as dead; whichleads him to believe that Death, apprehensive lest thisadmirable painter should exhibit him so lively that hewould no longer be feared as Death, and that he shouldthereby become immortal himself, had hastened his days toan end, and thus prevented him from completing manyother figures which he had already designed, especially thatof the carman crushed and wounded beneath his demolishedwagon, the wheels and horses of which are so frightfullyoverthrown that as much horror is excited in beholdingtheir downfall, as pleasure in contemplating the lickerishnessof one of the Deaths, who is clandestinely sucking with areed the wine in a bursting cask. 11 That in these imperfectsubjects no one had dared to put the finishing hand, on

11 The dedicator has apparently in this place been guilty of a strangemisconception. The Death is not sucking the wine from the cask, butin the act of untwisting the fastening to one of the hoops. Nor is thecarman crushed beneath the wheels : on the contrary, he is representedas standing upright and wringing his hands in despair at what hebeholds. It is true that this cut was not then completed, and mighthave undergone some subsequent alteration. He likewise speaks ofthe rainbow in the cut of the Last Judgment, as being at that timeunfinished, which, however, is introduced in this first edition.