inconsistent
with the theory. Original or not, it has a very startling likeness to a
plea which Holbein himself must have urged more than once, to soften a
bitterness his own errors could not have tended to cure.

When the Basel painting was cut out to be mounted, the last numeral was
lost; so that it now stands dated 152-. But all the other facts put it
beyond question that the picture could not have been done before 1529.
The baby of 1522 was now the boy of seven, and his successor would seem
to have been born during the first months of its father's visit to
England, and to be now some eighteen months old.

It may be as well to say here, once for all, as much as need be said of
Holbein's family. As already stated, his wife survived him by six years,
dying at Basel in 1549. By her first marriage she had one son, Franz
Schmidt--who seems to have been a worthy and successful man of trade.
She was the mother of four children by her marriage with Holbein;--Philip,
born 1522; Katharina, 1527; Jacob, about 1530; and Kuenegoldt, about
1532.

Some years before the painter's death he took Philip Holbein to Paris,
and there apprenticed him to the eminent goldsmith, Jerome David, with
whom he remained until a couple of years after Holbein's death. Later,
he somehow drifted to Lisbon, where he followed his trade until he
settled in the old home of his grandfather and great-grandfather,
Augsburg. In 1611 his son, Philip Holbein, junior, then "Imperial Court
Jeweller" at Augsburg, petitioned the Emperor Matthias for letters
patent to "confirm" his right to certain noble arms. The claims put
forward in this document are utterly at variance with the received
belief in Holbein's humble Augsburg origin. Yet the most expert
investigators who have carefully studied this subject agree in thinking
that this grandson based the genealogical tree on mythical foundations,
and therefore planted it remote from Augsburg itself. But be this as it
may--and it seems hard to reconcile such discrepancies within a century
of the time when both Hans Holbein the Elder and his son were well-known
citizens of Augsburg,--the application was successful. Mechel says that
this Philip, who claims descent from the renowned "painter of Basel,"
lived in Vienna during his later years; and that a descendant of his
again got their patent "confirmed" in 1756, with the right to carry the
surname of _Holbeinsberg_; also that this latter descendant was made a
Knight of