One of the finest and most touching conceptions in the whole series represents a dilapidated Cottage,—­a mere shanty, so wretched that the love of those who live in it is all their happiness,—­nay, all their comfort.  The mother is preparing for two little children the simplest and poorest of meals, at a fire made of a few small sticks.  She finds consolation in the very pranks that hinder her humble task.  Death enters,—­there is no door to keep him out,—­and, seizing the hand of the younger child, who turns and stretches out the other imploringly to his mother, carries him off, remorseless and exulting, leaving her frantic with grief.  We may look with comparative indifference, and sometimes even with sympathy, upon his other feats,—­but who is there that does not hate that grinning skeleton?—­And yet, perhaps, he exults that he has saved one soul, yet pure, from misery and crime.

For vigor of movement 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.