ement the group of Death and the Soldier is preeminent.
The field is covered with the wounded and the slain, in the midst
of which the soldier encounters his last enemy. The man is armed in
panoply, and wields a huge two-handed sword with a vigor unabated
by former struggles. Death has caught a shield from the arm of some
previous victim; but his only offensive weapon is a huge thigh-bone,
which we plainly see will bear down all before it. In the distance
another figure of Death flies madly over the hills, beating a drum which
summons other soldiers to the field. It is impossible to convey in words
the fierce eagerness of this figure, minute as it is, and composed of a
few lines.

The forty-seventh composition is one which has puzzled the critics
and antiquaries; but it is not easy to conjecture why. It shows us a
wretched Beggar, naked, sick, lame,--utterly destitute, miserable, and
forsaken,--suffering at once all the ills that flesh is heir to. He sits
huddled together on some straw, near a large building, and lifts his
hands and face up piteously to heaven. Death is not there; and the
antiquaries ask in wonder, Why is the subject introduced? Why, but to
show that to him alone who would gladly welcome Death, Death will not
come?

The work ends, as a connected series, with the Last Judgment, where
Christ, who conquered Death, appears seated on the bow of promise,--with
his feet resting on a celestial sphere, attended by angels, and showing
to a throng of those who have risen from the grave the wounds by which
he redeemed them from its power.

To this is added an ornamental tail-piece called Death's Arms. It shows
a skull in a battered shield, which has for a crest a regal helmet
surmounted by an hour-glass and two bony arms grasping a stone. The
supporters to the shield are a gentleman and lady richly dressed,--said
to represent Holbein and his wife.

It is not known, positively, when Holbein drew these designs upon the
blocks (for of course he did not engrave them); and it has even been
disputed by one or two eminent antiquarian critics, that he designed
them at all. But there does not appear to be a single valid reason for
thus diminishing his fame. He probably was engaged on them between
1531, the date of his first return to Bale, and 1538, when they were
published,--the year in which he refused the solicitation of his
townsmen to return to the home of his childhood and the bosom of his
family.

Holbein cont