nd, 'Adam and Eve in Paradise;' the
third, 'The Expulsion from Paradise;' the fourth, 'Adam Tilling the
Earth;' the fifth, 'The Bones of all People;' till the dance really
begins in the sixth. Death, a skeleton, as seen through the rest of the
designs, sometimes playing on a guitar or lute, sometimes carrying a
drum, bagpipes, a dulcimer, or a fiddle, now appearing with mitre on
head and crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the
parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he
seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with the Pope, going
down impartially through Emperor of Francis I., nobleman, advocate,
physician, ploughman, countess, old woman, little child, etc., etc., and
leading each unwilling or willing victim in turn to the terrible dance.
One woman meets her doom by Death in the character of a robber in a
wood. Another, the Duchess, sits up in bed fully dressed, roused from
her sleep by two skeletons, one of them playing a fiddle.

Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of
these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of
Albrecht Duerer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil,' or Orcagna's
'Triumph of Death.' In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling
faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable
fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the
time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and
told tales, till the pestilence was upon them. It has a closer
resemblance to the piteous madness with which the condemned prisoners
during the French Reign of Terror rehearsed the falling of the
guillotine, or the terrible pageant with which the same French, as
represented by their Parisian brethren, professed to hail the arrival of
the cholera.

Of the 'More Family' there are so many duplicates or versions, that, as
in the case of Erasmus's picture, it is hard to say which is the
original picture, or whether Holbein did more than sketch the original,
or merely sketch the various heads to be afterwards put together by an
inferior artist. A singular distribution of the light in the best
authenticated picture has been supposed to favour this conjecture. But
under any supposition, this, the second of the three noted English
family pictures, is of the greatest interest. I shall record a minute
and curious description given of this 'More Family,' which is still