22

THE DANCE OF DEATH.

speaks of a house at Basil, curiously painted byHolbein, but does not mention the subject; itwas probably the same as Burnet saw. These arethe only travellers who have spoken upon thissubject with any degree of accuracy, and fortu-nately their testimony throws much light upon it.To the book already mentioned to have beenpublished by the Trechsels, at Lyons, they some-times annexed another, which was in some degreeconnected with it, and appears to have beenprinted by them the following year. This wasentitled, " Historiarum veteris testamentiicones/'the cuts of which are in some instances much in-ferior to the others, and apparently by a differentartist. The designs of these are indisputably byHolbein, as appears from some verses before thebook,, composed by Nicolas Bourbon, a cotem-porary poet, who also wrote some lines upon aDance of Death painted by Holbein*. Tothese cuts to the Bible, are prefixed the first fourwhich occur in the Dance of Death, as they like-wise belong to the subject, and represent thecreation and fall of man; but they are different insize, and were added, not only from the analogyof the subjects, but from the circumstance oftheir being already in the hands of the printer ;and thus, from an odd coincidence of things, aswell as a palpable confusion of the respectiveverses of Bourbon, seems to have originated an

* Borbonii Nugarum libri octo. Basil 1540, 12mo. p. 445.