umstantial evidence it is certain that Holbein not only wrote,
but read and pondered and thought for himself in these years when
he doubtless had many more hours of leisure than he desired, from a
financial standpoint.

And the greatest pages of his autobiography, written with his brush,
will be only so many childish rebuses if we forget what astounding pages
of History and Argument were turned before him. In Augsburg he had seen
the Emperor Maximilian riding in state more than once, and heard much
talk about that Emperor's interests and schemes and fears; and of
thrones and battlefields engaged with or against these. Augsburg was in
closest ties of commerce with Venice; and the tides of many a tremendous
issue of civilisation rolled to and fro through the gates of the Free
Swabian City.

Child and lad, his was a precocious intelligence; and it had been fed
upon meat for strong men. He had heard of Alexander VI.'s colossal
infamies, and those of Caesar Borgia as well; and of the kingdoms ranging
to this or that standard after the death of Pope and Prince. He was nine
years old then. Old enough, too, to drink in the wonderful hero-tales
of one Christopher Columbus of Genoa, whose fame was running through
the Whispering Gallery of Europe, while he himself lay dying at
Valladolid--ill, heartbroken, poor, disgraced,--yet proudly confident
that he had demonstrated, past all denial, the truth of his own
conviction, and touched the shores of Cathay, sailing westward from
Spain. Da Gama, Vespucci, Balboa, Magellan,--theirs were indeed names
and deeds to set the heart of youth leaping, between its cradle and its
twenty-fifth year.

Holbein was twelve when Augsburg heard that England had a young king,
whom it crowned as Henry VIII. He was setting out from his home, such as
it was, to fight his own boyish battle of Life, when the news spread of
Flodden's Field. None of these things would let such an one as he was
rest content to apprehend them as a yokel. From either the honest dominie
of the Signboard or some other, we may be sure he sought the means to
read and digest them for himself. And if he learnt some smattering of
the geography of the earth and the heavens after the crude notions of
an older day, he could have done no other, at that time, in the most
enlightened Universities. Ptolemy's _Geographia_ was still the text-book,
and the so-called "Ptolemaic Theory" still the astronomical creed of
scholars. Copernicus was, in