-using the name for the whole
Lutheran movement in which Protestantism had its rise,--the assertions
are even less grounded in fact, if that be possible. If he had it not
already in his heart, through Erasmus and Amerbach and Froben and More
and every other great influence to which he yielded himself at all, he
early acquired a deep and devout sense of the need of reform _within_
the Church. Like all these lifelong friends, he wanted to see the Church
of Rome return to her purer days and cast off the corruptions of a
profligate idleness. Like them he couched his lance against the unworthy
priest, the gluttonous or licentious monk, the wolves in sheep's clothing
that were destroying the fold from within. Like them, as they re-echoed
Colet--the saintly Dean of St. Paul's,--he passionately favoured the
translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular and placing them in
the hands, or at any rate bringing them to the familiar knowledge, of
peasant as well as prelate. But surely one must know very little of the
teachings of the stoutest Churchmen of Holbein's day and acquaintance
not to know also that they encouraged if they did not plant these
opinions in his mind.

"Duerer's woodcuts and engravings, especially his various scenes from the
Passion," writes even Woltmann, the biographer to whom every student of
Holbein owes so grateful a debt, "had prepared the soil among the people
for Luther's translation of the Bible. Holbein's pictures from the Old
Testament followed in their wake, and helped forward the work." Yet it
seems difficult to suppose that Woltmann could have been ignorant of
the facts of the case. So far were Holbein's, or any other artist's,
Bible illustrations or Bible pictures from arguing a "Lutheran" monopoly
in the vernacular Bible, that in Germany alone there were fifteen
translated and illustrated editions of the Bible before Luther's
appeared; and of these fifteen some half-dozen were published before
Luther was born. Quentell, at Cologne, for instance, published a famous
translation with exceedingly good woodcuts in 1480,--three years before
Luther's birth. While some nine years before Quentell's German
translation, the Abbot Niccolo Malermi published his _Biblia Vulgare_ in
the Italian vernacular, which went through twenty editions in less than
a century: one of which,--brought out at Venice in 1490 by the Giunta
Brothers,--was illustrated by woodcuts of the greatest beauty. So
widespread was the de