igin.
The leaves on which the cuts are printed make but part of a little book
not so large as a child's primer; but a copy of it is now worth ten
times its weight in gold. It was copied and republished in numberless
editions, as a popular book, merely for the sake of the subject, and
the great lesson taught by it,--each print being accompanied by an
admonitory stanza, and a quotation from the Bible. Beside these
editions, endeavors have been made of later years to imitate it
satisfactorily as a work of Art,--but in vain. Great as we think our
advancement in the arts has been,--the mechanical part of them, at
least,--all the efforts of the lithographer, the wood-cutter, and even
the line-engraver, to reproduce the spirit or the very lines of this
work, have been but partially successful. There is as much difference
between the most carefully-executed and costliest copies and good
impressions of the original wood-cuts, made three hundred years ago, and
sold for a franc or two, as there is between pinchbeck and gold.

Any attempt to reproduce the effect of those groups in words can hardly
fail to fall equally short of the mark; but we will tell our readers
what they are, and endeavor to give some notion of their purpose and
spirit.

The first shows the Creation of Woman;--we have seen before why she is
made thus prominent in the Dance. The composition is crowded with the
denizens of the earth, the air, and the water; the sun, the moon, and
the stars all appear; the four winds of heaven issue from the laboring
cheeks of figures that impersonate them. The Creator, in the form of
an aged man in royal robes, and wearing the imperial crown, lifts Eve
bodily from the side of the sleeping Adam.

The second represents the Temptation. Eve reclines upon the ground, and
shows Adam the fruit which she has plucked. Adam stands grasping the
tree with his left hand, and raises his right to gather for himself. The
serpent, who looks down upon Eve, has the face and body of a woman. The
forms in this group are fine; Adam's is remarkable for its symmetry and
grace; but Eve's face is ignoble. Indeed, Holbein, like Rembrandt, seems
to have been incapable of an idea of female beauty.

In the third we see the Expulsion from Paradise; and here the Dance
begins. Our guilty parents fly before the flaming sword,--poor Eve
cowering, and her hair streaming in a wavy flood upon the wind; and
before them, but unseen, Death leaps and curvets to the s