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124 in a lantern before him, and rings the warning bell; the drunkard gulps his liquor, the judge takes his bribe, the miser counts his gold—Death interrupts them with a sneer. What poetic feeling, what dramatic force, there is in the picture of the Nun! (Fig. 51.) She kneels with head averted from the altar of her devotions toward the youth who sits upon the bed playing the lute to her sleeping soul, and at the moment Death stands there to put out the light of the taper which shall leave her in darkness forever. What sharp satire there is in the representation of the Preacher (Fig. 52), dilating, perhaps, in his accustomed, half-mechanical way, upon the terrors of that very Death already at his elbow! What justness of sight, what grimness of reality, there is in the representation of the Ploughman (Fig. 53); how directly does Holbein bring us face to face with the human curse—in the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn death! George Sand, looking out on the spring fields of her remote province and seeing the French peasants ploughing up the soft and smoking soil, remembered this type of peasant life as Holbein saw it, and described this cut in words that vivify the concentrated meaning of the whole series. "The engraving," she says, "represents a farmer guiding the plough in the middle of a field. A vast plain extends into the distance, where there