The insignificance of the material in which the painter worked, when compared with the effect which he produced, is also remarkable in this unique work of Art.  For Holbein’s Dance of Death is not, like the others, either a great fresco painting, or a series of sculptures; it is not a painting at all,—­but merely a series of very small woodcuts, fifty-three in number, forty-six of which were published at Lyons in 1538, and the whole afterwards at Bale in 1554, under the title, Simulachres de la Mort, Icones Mortis: that is, in French and Latin, “Images of Death,”—­for the title “Dance of Death” is of recent origin.  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 sound of a vielle or rote,—­an old musical stringed instrument,—­which he has hung about his neck.  His glee, as he leads forth his victims into the valley where his shadow lies, is perceptible in every line of his angular anatomy; his very toes curl up like those of a baby in its merriment.