ver and his brother Adam, and by Gaultier
Leprevost, whose names are preserved in the church registers of St.
Maclou.

Each relief showed a group in which some living figure is dragged to
death by a triumphant skeleton, and chief among them were our first
parents Adam and Eve, the origins of death for every generation after.

"Mors qui venis de mors de pome
Primes en feme et puis en home
Tu bats le siecle comme toile."

On other pillars were an emperor, a king, a high constable, a duke, a
courtier, a pope, a cardinal, a bishop, and an abbot. They seem to
cry, like Villon, with a phrase that is especially appropriate to a
Rouen cemetery:

"Haro, haro, le grand et le mineur,
Et qu'est cecy--mourray, sans coup ferir?"

Without the power to struggle, they are haled from their high places
to the levelling tomb.

Reproductions of the first Todtentanz of Hans Holbein the younger are
now within the reach of everyone, and they have made these terrible
imaginations of the early sixteenth century the common property of all
who care to look at them. Designed just before 1526, when the horrors
of the Peasants' War and of innumerable outbreaks of pestilence and
famine had left fresh traces in the minds of everyone, they were not
published until 1538 at Lyons by Melchoir and Gaspar Trechsel. After
the sixth edition of 1562 no further addition to the plates is known.
They were cut with a knife upon wood, and not with the ordinary
graver, in 1527, or a little earlier, by Hans of Luxemburg, sometimes
called Franck, whose full signature is on Holbein's Alphabet in the
British Museum, which contains several sets of the impressions,
believed to be engraver's proofs from the original blocks, such as
exist also in Berlin, at Basle, in Paris, and at Carlsruhe. They have
been frequently copied, but the best modern imitations in wood
engraving are those made in 1833 for Douce's "Holbein's Dance of
Death," which come nearest to the incomparable skill of Hans of
Luxemburg, and have been reproduced again, only in this last year, by
George Bell of London.

The oldest representation of this idea is probably to be found at
Minden in Westphalia, and bears the date of 1383. But it was known
also at Dresden, at Lubeck, in Lucerne, in the chateau of Blois, in
Auvergne, and elsewhere in France. In all these places Death is shown
dancing with men of every age and condition, and carrying them off
with him to the grave. The