there is a touch of peculiar, almost pathetic interest about
the Schoolmaster's Signboard preserved by Bonifacius Amerbach, and now
with his collection in the Basel Museum (Plate 3). It is a simple thing,
with no pretension to a place among "works of art"--this bit of flotsam
from 1516, when it was painted. Originally the two views, the Infant
Class and the Adult Class, were on opposite sides of the sign; but they
have been carefully split apart so as to be seen side by side. In the
one is the quaint but usual Dame's School of the period; in the other
the public is informed how the adults of Basel may retrieve the lack of
such early opportunities. The inscription above each sets forth how
whosoever wishes to do so can be taught to read and write correctly, and
be furnished with all the essentials of a decent education at a very
moderate cost; "children on the usual terms." And there is a delightful
clause to say that "if anyone is too dull-witted to learn at all, no
payment will be accepted, be it Burger or Apprentice, Wife or Maid."

Somehow, looking at the young fellow at the right of the table, in the
Adult Class, sitting facing the anxious schoolmaster, with his own brow
all furrowed by the effort to follow him and his mouth doggedly set to
succeed,--while the late, low sun of a summer afternoon streams in
through the leaded window,--one muses on the chance that so may the young
painter from Augsburg, now but nineteen, himself have sat upon this very
bench and leaned across this very table, in a like determination to
widen out his small store of book-learning. He could have had little
opportunity to do so in the ever-shifting, bailiff-haunted home of his
boyhood. And somewhere he certainly learned to write quite as well as
even the average gentleman of his day; witness the notes on his
drawings.

Illustration: PLATE 3
SCHOOLMASTER'S SIGNBOARD
_Oils. Basel Museum_

Somewhere, too, and no later than these first Basel years, he acquired
the power to read and appreciate even the niceties of Latin, though
he probably could not have done more than make these out to his own
satisfaction. All his work of illustration is too original, too
spontaneous, too full of flashes of subtle personal sympathy with the
text, to have emanated from an interpreter, or been dictated by another
mind than his own. And this very Signboard may have paid for lessons
which he could not otherwise afford. For if there is any force in
circ