e beautiful to
allow their pencil to sport with deformity; but the Gothic taste of the
German artists, who could only copy their own homely nature, delighted
to give human passions to the hideous physiognomy of a noseless skull;
to put an eye of mockery or malignity into its hollow socket, and to
stretch out the gaunt anatomy into the postures of a Hogarth; and that
the ludicrous might be carried to its extreme, this imaginary being,
taken from the bone-house, was viewed in the action of _dancing_! This
blending of the grotesque with the most disgusting image of mortality,
is the more singular part of this history of the skeleton, and indeed of
human nature itself!

"The Dance of Death," erroneously considered as Holbein's, with other
similar Dances, however differently treated, have one common subject
which was painted in the arcades of burying-grounds, or on town-halls,
and in market-places. The subject is usually "The Skeleton" in the act
of leading all ranks and conditions to the grave, personated after
nature, and in the strict costume of the times. This invention opened a
new field for genius; and when we can for a moment forget their luckless
choice of their bony and bloodless hero, who to amuse us by a variety of
action becomes a sort of horrid Harlequin in these pantomimical scenes,
we may be delighted by the numerous human characters, which are so
vividly presented to us. The origin of this extraordinary invention is
supposed to be a favourite pageant, or religious mummery, invented by
the clergy, who in these ages of barbarous Christianity always found it
necessary to amuse, as well as to frighten the populace; a circumstance
well known to have occurred in so many other grotesque and licentious
festivals they allowed the people. The practice of dancing in churches
and church-yards was interdicted by several councils; but it was found
convenient in those rude times. It seems probable that the clergy
contrived the present dance, as more decorous and not without moral and
religious emotions. This pageant was performed in churches, in which the
chief characters in society were supported in a sort of masquerade,
mixing together in a general dance, in the course of which every one in
his turn vanished from the scene, to show how one after the other died
off. The subject was at once poetical and ethical; and the poets and
painters of Germany adopting the skeleton, sent forth this chimerical
Ulysses of another world