But neither of these notions is near the truth.  The Dance of Death is not a revel, and in it Death does not dance at all.  A Dance of Death, or a Dance Macabre, as it was called, is a succession of isolated pictures, all informed with the same motive, it is true, but each independent of the others, and consisting of a group, generally of but two figures, one of which is the representative of Death.  The second always represents a class; and in this figure every rank, from the very highest to the lowest, finds its type.  The number of these groups or pictures varies considerably in the different dances, according to the caprice of the artist, or, perhaps, to the expense of his time and labor which he thought warranted by the payment he was to receive.  But all express, with sufficient fulness, the idea that Death is the common lot of humanity, and that he enters with impartial feet the palace and the cottage, neither pitying youth nor respecting age, and waiting no convenient season.

The figure of Death in these strange religious works of Art,—­for they were as purely religious in their origin as the Holy Families and Madonnas of the same and a subsequent period,—­this figure of Death is not always a skeleton.  It is so in but one of the forty groups in the Dance at Bale, which was the germ of Holbein’s, and which, indeed, until very recently, was attributed to him, although it was painted more than half a century before he was born.  It is generally assumed that a skeleton has always been the representative of Death, but erroneously; for, in fact, Holbein was the first to fix upon a mere skeleton for the embodiment of that idea.

The Hebrew Scriptures, which furnish us with the earliest extant allusion to Death as a personage, designate him as an angel or messenger of God,—­as, for instance, in the record of the destruction of the Assyrian host in the Second Book of Kings (xix. 35).  The ancient Egyptians, too, in whose strange system of symbolism may be found the germ, at least, of most of the types used in the religion and the arts of more modern nations, had no representation of Death as an individual agent.  They expressed the extinction of life very naturally and simply by the figure of a mummy.  Such a figure it was their custom to pass round among the guests at their feasts; and the Greeks and Romans imitated them, with slight modifications, in the form of the image and the manner of the ceremony.  Some scholars have found in this custom a deep moral and religious significance, akin to that which certainly attached to the custom of placing a slave in the chariot of a Roman conquering general to say to him at intervals, as his triumphal procession moved with pomp and splendor through the swarming streets, “Remember that thou art a man.”  But this is too subtile a conjecture.  The ceremony was but a silent way of saying, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” which, as Paul’s solemn irony makes but too plain, must be the philosophy of life to those who believe that the dead rise not, which was the case with the Egyptians and the Greeks, and the Hebrews also.  An old French epitaph expresses to the full this philosophy:—­