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 Bale the arts were chilled; which might well be true of a place where so much ado was made about the painting of a fly.

In England, Holbein found a friend and patron in Sir Thomas More,—­Henry the Eighth’s great Lord Chancellor; and a sight of some of his works won him, ere long, the favor of the King himself.  He was appointed Court Painter, with apartments at the palace, and a yearly salary of two hundred florins, (or thirty pounds, equal to about two hundred pounds now,) which he received in addition to the price of his pictures.  After about three years of prosperity he went home to his wife and children; but as he soon returned to England, we may safely conclude that his visit was to provide for the latter, and with no hope of living with the former.  Some years after, in 1538, when his fame was still increasing, the city of Bale, proud of its son, offered him a handsome annuity, in the hope that that might induce him to return to his country, his children, and his wife.  But he could not be tempted.  Though not the wisest of men, he was Solomon enough to know that “it is better to dwell in a corner of the house-top than with a brawling woman and in a wide house”; and as he was successful and held in honor in England as well as Bale, he contented himself with a corner of King Henry’s palace.