ems of
this visit give us glimpses of its flesh-and-blood realities, perhaps of
its unrest. The first, that he also joined a local company of Archers,
the Militia of his day, seems to bring his living footfall very close.
A resonant, manly, wholesome footfall it is, too! This broad-shouldered
young fellow is as ready to draw a good stout bow among mountain-marksmen
as a lamb among its daffodils. The second item makes it still clearer
that he had other elements as well as the pastoral in his blood. On the
10th of December he got himself fined for his share in a street-scrimmage,
where he would seem to have decidedly preferred the livelier to the
"better part" of valour.

And then he would appear to have shaken the dust, or more likely the
snows, of Lucerne off his feet for the road to Italy, if not for Italy
itself. Whatever his objective, he got, at any rate, well on toward the
Pass of the St. Gothard. The scanty clues of such works as have remained
on record prove that he reached Altdorf. But there the actual trail is
altogether lost. If he spent the entire interval brush in hand, or
if--as I believe--he treated himself to a bit of a holiday beyond the
Alps, can be but a guess in the dark.

By this time the New Year of 1518, then falling in March, could not have
been far off, before or behind him. And in 1518 Holbein executed the
commission which must have been the envy of every local artist. Jacob
von Hertenstein, Burgomaster of Lucerne, had now got his fine new house
ready for decoration; and it was to Holbein that he gave the splendid
commission to decorate it to his fancy,--the interior as well as the
facade.

And a renowned triumph the painter made of it; a triumph such as,
perhaps, no other artist north of Italy could then have equalled. It is
idle now to dwell upon the religious subjects of one room, the genre
paintings in another, the battle scenes of a third, and so on through
those five famous rooms which were still in existence and fair
preservation so late as 1824, but are now for ever lost; to say nothing
of the painted Renaissance architecture and the historic legends which
looked like solid realities when the facade was studied. But "Mizraim is
become merchandise"; and all that is now left of what should have been a
treasured and priceless heirloom is but a monument to the shame of that
citizen, a banker, who could condemn such a thing to destruction as
indifferently as if it had been a cowshed, and t