s and delicacy of the actual cutting. A clouded eye, a
fumbling touch, and the most ethereal idea becomes its travesty--the
purest line debased. Hence the necessity for taking the knife into
consideration in judging such work.

This is not the place for any fraction of that hot debate which Kugler
ironically styles "the great question of the sixteenth century"; the
debate as to whether Holbein himself did or did not cut any of his own
blocks. Assuredly he could do so. The exquisite adjustment of every
line to its final purpose, the masterly understanding of the proper
limitations and field of every effect, all prove that he had an unerring
knowledge of the craft no less than of the art of Illustration. But in
his day that craft, like every other, had its own guild; and it would
not have been likely to tolerate any intrusion on its rights.

We know, too, that those woodcuts which most attest Holbein's genius
were engraved by that mysterious "Hans Luetzelburger, form-cutter, called
Franck" (_Hans Luetzelburger, Formschnider, genannt Franck_), who still
remains, after all the researches of enthusiastic admirers, a hand and a
name, and beyond this--nothing. But it is when Holbein's designs are
engraved with Luetzelburger's astonishingly beautiful cutting that we can
appreciate how wonderful was the design itself. To compare these fairy
pictures with the painter's large cartoons is to get some conception of
the arc his powers described. It seems incredible that the same hand
could hang an equal majesty on the wall of a tiny shell and on that of a
king's palace, and with equal justness of eye. Yet it is done. He will
ride a donkey or an elephant with the like mastery; but you will never
find Holbein saddling the donkey with a howdah.

It is not always possible to subscribe to Ruskin's flowing judgments;
but I gratefully borrow the one with which he sums up thus, in a lecture
on wood-engraving: Holbein does not give many gradations of light, the
speaker says, "but not because Holbein cannot give chiaroscuro if he
chooses. He is twenty times a stronger master of it than Rembrandt; but
therefore he knows exactly when and how to use it, and that wood-engraving
is not the proper means for it. The quantity of it which is needful for
his story he will give, and that with an unrivalled subtlety."

And the student of Holbein's art can but feel that Ruskin has here
touched upon a characteristic of the painter's peculiar power in ever