tched with the point, in chalks or Indian
ink, of which examples may be seen in almost every great collection,
private as well as public, that year after year were created by that
fertile brain and ever more masterly hand, constitute an Art in
themselves. And since so many (perhaps the greater number as well as the
greater in subject) of his paintings have perished, it is chiefly in his
drawings that the progression of his powers can be followed, or the
plane and scope of his imagination recognised at all. There is seldom
a date on them; but they will be found to date themselves pretty
accurately by certain features. In his earliest, for instance, that
defect of which mention has been made,--the short thick figures due
to the energy of his rebound from Gothic attenuation is a grave fault.
There is a Virgin and Child among his washed drawings for glass-paintings
in the Basel Museum, for example, which, when you cut it off at the
knees, is one of the most charming pictures of Mother and Child to be
found in any painter's treatment of this subject. And behind them is a
gem of landscape. Yet the whole, as it stands, is utterly marred by the
Virgin's dwarfed limbs. But although Holbein never entirely overcame
this fault, he did very greatly do so, as the years passed.

His architectural settings, too, tended to greater simplicity in his
later years. Yet this is not a safe guide. Some early designs have
simple forms; some comparatively late ones, a very ornate architecture.
For the truth is that these architectural backgrounds and settings
remained, so long as his fancy had any free field for disporting itself,
an integral part of his conception. But only as inseparable from the
Symbolism, the under-tow, of his imagination. To my thinking, at any
rate, they make a gravid mistake who look for "realism" in these things.

His stately pillars and arches, his fluid forms of ornament, are not his
idea of the actual surroundings of the characters he portrays, any more
than they are your idea, or mine, of those surroundings. Is it to be
supposed that he thought the dwellings of our Lord were palaces? Or
that he could not paint a stable? Those who maintain that Holbein was a
Realist in the modern sense of the word must reconcile as best they can
the theory with the facts. But when we see the stage set with every
stately circumstance,--the Babe amid the fading splendours of earthly
palaces, our Lord mocked by matter as well as man,--I