much devotion;--not that he was
a drunkard or a debauchee; but he sought in conviviality with men of
talent, and in the company of beautiful women, too happy in the caresses
of the great painter, who was generous with his florins, that happiness
which he could not find at home. For poor Hans was afflicted with what
has been the moral and social ruin of many a better, if not greater man
than he--a froward, shrill-tongued wife. Luckily, however, the great
scholar and philosopher, Erasmus, went into retirement at Bale, in 1521;
and he soon recognized the genius of Holbein, and became his admirer and
friend. By his advice, and at the solicitation of an English nobleman,
and, poor fellow, seeking refuge from the temper of his wife, whom even
the sweet cares of maternity could not mollify, Holbein determined to
leave Bale for England. What was the great cause of Frau Holbein's
tantrums,--whether Hans's ears were pierced with conjugal clamors, as
poor Albert Duerer's, the other great German painter's, were, because
he could not supply all his wife's demands for money, to enable her,
perhaps, to exhibit herself at church on holy days in one of those
precious pulpits, splendid in velvet and jewels, to the discomfiture of
the other painters' wives,--we do not know; but whatever was the cause
of her oft-recurring outbreaks, they made him not unwilling to put
France and the English Channel between himself and her, his children,
and the home of his childhood.

He gave out, at first, that his absence from Bale would be
temporary,--only for the purpose of raising the value of his works, by
making them more difficult to obtain. Before he went, he finished and
sent home a portrait on which he was engaged. It was one of his best
pictures; and the person for whom it was painted, lost for a while in
admiration of its beauty, noticed at last that a fly, which had settled
upon the forehead, remained there motionless. He stepped up to brush the
insect away, and found that it was a part of the picture. This story
has, since Holbein's time, been told of many painters,--among others, of
Benjamin West. Such a piece of mere imitation should have added nothing
to the reputation of a painter of Holbein's powers; but the story was
soon told all over Bale, and orders were given to prevent the loss
to the city of so great an artist. But Holbein had quietly gone off,
furnished with letters of introduction from Erasmus, who wrote in one of
them that in