y the painter., and sought to
retaliate in kind by writing below the sketch of a rude boor drinking,
'_Holbein_.' In spite of the rough jesting, the friendship between
scholar and painter was not interrupted.

In these early days Holbein sometimes practised painting on glass, after
the example of some of his kinsmen. At Basle, Holbein painted what is
considered his finest work, the 'Meier Madonna,' now at Darmstadt, with
a copy in the Dresden Gallery, and there he executed the designs for his
series of woodcuts of the 'Dance of Death.'

At Basle Holbein married, while still a young man. The presumption that
the painter's marriage, like that of his countryman, Albert Duerer, was
unhappy, has rested on the foundation that he left his wife and her
children behind when he repaired to England, and that although he
re-visited Basle, and saw his wife and family, they did not return with
him to England. A fancied confirmation to the unhappiness of the
marriage is found in the expression of the wife in a portrait which
Holbein painted of her and his children when he was at Basle.
'Cross-looking and red-eyed,' one critic calls the unlucky woman;
another describes her as 'a plain, coarse-looking, middle-aged woman,'
with an expression 'certainly mysterious and unpleasant.' Holbein's
latest biographer[36] has proved that the forsaken wife, Elssbeth
Schmid, was a widow with one son when Holbein married her, and has
conjectured that she was probably not only older than Holbein, but in
circumstances which rendered her independent of her husband. So far the
critic has done something to clear Hans Holbein from the miserable
accusation often brought against him, that he abandoned his wife and
children to starve at Basle, while he sunned himself in such court
favour as could be found in England. But, indeed, while Hans Holbein may
have been honest and humane enough to have been above such base
suspicions, there is no trace of him which survives that goes to
disprove the probability that he was a self-willed, not over-scrupulous
man, if he was also a vigorous and thorough worker.

Holbein came to England about 1526 or 1527, when he must have been
thirty-one or thirty-two years of age, and repaired to Chelsea to the
house of Sir Thomas More, to whom the painter brought a letter of
introduction, and still better credentials in the present, from Erasmus
to More, of the portrait of Erasmus, painted by Hans Holbein. There are
so many portrai