Page:A History of Wood-Engraving.djvu/133

Rh human dignity as a divine messenger; but, mindful only of the supreme law which is over all men equally, kneels loyally and obediently before his king, and calls on him to humiliate himself, not before man, but in the solitary presence of God. The power of the universal law, independent alike of the majesty of the criminal or the lowliness of its servant, has never been pictured with greater subtlety and force than is here done. There are others among these designs of equal excellence, both in imagination and art, but in all the best of them there is some human interest in the scene which attracted Holbein’s heart; in others, such as the illustrations to the books of the Prophets, he falls into a feebleness of conception and baldness of allegorical statement which shows clearly how little he cared for what was merely supernatural. The series, nevertheless, is, as a whole, the best which was made in that century, and was reprinted several times to satisfy the popular demand for it; it first appeared, contemporaneously with the Dance of Death, in 1538, at Lyons; the text was afterward published in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and English, but the work never obtained the extraordinary popularity of the Dance of Death. It is noteworthy that no edition of either work was printed in German—so far had Holbein outstripped his countrymen in the purity of art.

When these two works appeared at Lyons, Holbein had been for many years a resident at the English court, where he painted that series of portraits which remains unsurpassed as a gallery of typical English men and women represented by an artist capable of revealing character as well as of portraying looks. In these later years of his life he busied himself but little with designing for woodcuts, but