on his art--Work for the Burgomaster
of Lucerne.

The eighty-three years stretching from 1461 to 1543--between the
probable year of the elder Hans Holbein's birth and that in which the
younger, the great Holbein, died--constitute one of those periods which
rightly deserve the much-abused name of an Epoch. The Christian era of
itself had known many: the Yellow-Danger of the fifth century making one
hideous smear across Europe; the _Hic Jacet_ with which this same
century entombed an Empire three continents could not content; the new
impulse which Charlemagne and Alfred had given to Progress in the ninth
century; the triumphant establishment of Papal Supremacy, that Napoleonic
idea of Gregory VII.--_Sanctus Satanas_, of the eleventh, and grand
architect in a vaster Roman Empire which still "humanly contends for
glory"; and lastly, at the very threshold of the Holbeins, the invention
of movable printing types about 1440, and the fall of Constantinople in
1453, which combined to drive the prodigies and potencies of Greek
genius through the world.

Each of these had done its own special work for the advancement
of man--as for that matter all things must, whether by help or
helplessness. Not less than Elijah did the wretched priests of Baal
serve those slow, sure, eternal Purposes, which include an Ahab and all
the futile fury of his little life as the sun includes its "spots."

But although the stream of History is one, and its every succeeding
curve only an expansion of the first, there has probably been no century
of our era when this stream has been so suddenly enlarged, or bent so
sharply toward fresh constellations as in that of the Holbeins,--when
Religion and Art, as well as Science, saw a New World upon its astonished
horizon. So that we properly call it a transition period, and its
representative men "transitional."

Yet we shall never get near to these real men, to their real world, unless
we can forget all about the pose of this or the other Zeitgeist--that tale

_Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing._

For we must keep constantly in mind that what we call the Middle Ages
or--worse yet--the Dark Ages, made up the Yesterday of the Holbeins and
was the flesh and blood transmitted to them as their own flesh and blood
with all its living bonds toward the Old and all its living impulses
toward the New.

A now famous New Zealander is, we know, to sketch our own "mediaevalism"
w