mony seems
hardly calculated to secure for it a noteworthy popularity in any age;
but for a long time it was, either as a ceremony or as a picture, very
popular throughout Europe. We know of forty-four places in which it was
painted or sculptured in some large public building, the oldest example
being that at Little Bale, which was painted in 1312. This, like that
in Great Bale, and most of the others, has been destroyed by time or
violence. The Dance was made the ornament of books of devotion, and the
subject of ornamental initial-letters; groups from it were engraved
repeatedly by those fantastic designers and exquisite workmen known as
the Little Masters of Germany; a single group was assumed as a device,
or trademark, by more than one printer; and it was sung in popular
ballads. There is now at Aix-la-Chapelle a huge state-bed-stead, on the
posts, sides, and footboards of which it is elaborately carved, in the
manner of the sixteenth century; and it was even made the ornament of
ladies' fans.

The reasons for this popularity were a certain strange fascination in
the subject,--yet not so strange at a time when women would crowd to see
men burned or hanged and quartered;--but chiefly, the grand democratic
significance of the dance. Death has ever been, and ever will be,
the greatest leveller; and at a time when rank had an importance and
bestowed advantages of which we can form little idea, while at the same
time men had begun to ask why this should be, such a satire as this
Dance of Death, sanctioned by the Church, that great protector of
established rights and dignities, and yet sparing neither noble nor
hierarch, not even the Pope himself, satisfied an eager craving in the
breast of poor, envious, self-asserting human nature. In one of those
ornamental initial-letters above mentioned, the date of which was some
years prior to the execution of Holbein's Dance, Death appears as a
grave-digger, and lifts on his spade, out of the grave which he is
making, two skulls, one crowned, the other covered with a peasant's hat.
He grins with savage glee at seeing these remnants of the two extremes
of society side by side; and underneath them, on the shovel, is written
_Idem_,--"The Same." In this word is the key to the popularity of the
Dance.

The most important and interesting of these pictured Dances of Death
were those at Bale, at Strasbourg, and at Rouen. That at Bale consisted
of thirty-nine groups, in the first three o