to advertise upon
a picture of his wife that he held her "in all honour."

Myself, I must believe, then, that this portrait was made years before
1522; probably in the young painter's first months in Basel, in 1515;
and thus some fourteen years before the Basel group of 1529 was painted.
It may well have been that some serious misunderstanding between them
was at the bottom of that otherwise inexplicable departure in 1517, and
the two years' absence in Lucerne and still more southern cities. Of
course this is mere guesswork; so is every hypothesis until it is proved.
But all the simple commonplaces of first love, estrangement, separation,
and a renewed betrothal after Elsbeth's early widowhood with one child,
could easily have run a natural course between 1515 and their marriage,
somewhere about 1520.

As for the inscription,--it is a detail that Woltmann thinks represents
a repetition of the one phrase, and that I imagine to have suggested
what for some reason Holbein did not wish to proclaim:--"In all honour.
[In all love.]" But nothing can shake my conviction that in it we hear
the faint far-off echoes from some belfry in Holbein's own city of Is.
The realities of that chime are buried,--whether well or ill,--four
hundred years deep in the seas that roll over that submerged world of
his youth and passion. But living emotion, we may be sure, went to the
writing and the treasuring of this pledge to Elsbeth or himself; a
pledge redeemed when she became his wife.

Thus for the altar-piece of 1522 there would be this portrait of Elsbeth
in her girlhood ready to his hand. But even so, see how he has idealised
it, made a new creature of it, all compact of exquisite ideals! He has
eliminated the subtle sensuousness which has its own allure in the
drawing. Every trait is refined, purified, vivified, raised to another
plane of character. Genius has put the inferior elements into its
retort, and transmuted them to some heavenly metal far enough from
Holbein's home-life.

Throughout all these years, as has been said, he was busy for the
printers also. In 1522 he drew the noble title-page for Petri's edition
of Luther's New Testament, with the figures of St. Peter and St. Paul
at either side, of which mention has been made. And in Thomas Wolff's
edition of 1523 there is a series of his designs. His alphabets, borders,
illustrations of all sorts, continued to enrich the Basel press from
this date, and were often borrowed by p