ttle pen-picture of Holbein's intimate
circle is a beautiful break in the mists of centuries--and shows us what
manner of men they were among whom he had made for himself an honoured
place. We could ill spare it from the few and meagre records of his
life. It is also the very earliest documentary evidence of his being in
the King's immediate service.

It was in this very year, 1536, that he received his commission to paint
Anne Boleyn's successor, Jane Seymour, then on the throne the block
had left vacant. The Vienna Gallery possesses this painting, of which
another version is at Woburn Abbey, and the chalk drawing at Windsor
(Plate 30).

Illustration: PLATE 30
QUEEN JANE SEYMOUR
_Oils. Vienna Gallery_

The Queen was noted for her milk-white fairness, and Holbein has
borrowed the pearly shadows of the lily in rendering it. The figure is a
little under life-size. Her head-dress and robes of silver brocade and
royal velvet are studded with splendid rubies and pearls to match the
jewels on her neck and breast. The hands are as full of character as of
art.

The Queen's portrait may properly be said to belong to the great wall
painting which Holbein finished in 1537 for the Royal Palace at Whitehall.
But before that date the painter's inner life had suffered one more
great wrench. At midnight of July 12th, 1536, Erasmus died in the home
that had been his own, except for the Freiburg interval, ever since John
Froben's death in 1526; a death that had probably had much to do with
Holbein's first departure from Basel. That event had uprooted the
scholar from the old house _zum Sessel_, in the Fischmarkt, and
transplanted him to the home of Froben's son, Hieronymus. The latter
house, then known as _zum Luft_, is now No. 18, Baeumleingasse. And it
was here that Erasmus passed away, his mind keeping to the last its
humour and its interests in all around him. But no one, remembering how
Fisher and More had died in the preceding year, can doubt but that the
good old man was very willing to be gone, away from changed faces and
changed ways--though Bonifacius Amerbach and young Froben were as sons
to him.

Basel, for all her differences with him, buried Erasmus with great
honours. But no tablet could so commemorate him as the noble monument
which Holbein built to him in the title-page he designed for Hieronymus
Froben's edition of Erasmus's _Works_, published in 1540. It is a
woodcut of extraordinary beauty. The full-lengt