Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/65

 ALBERT DURER 235 the engraver, and in 1 5 1 1, brought out in complete form his great book of wood- cuts in folio, and began to develop that marvellous art of etching which is in- dissolubly connected with his name. Among the products of the etcher's needle which attest his activity in this direction are those masterpieces which have for centuries been at once the delight and the puzzle of artistic minds : the " Melan- cholia," " The Knight and the Devil," and " St. Jerome in his Cell." The most reasonable explanation of these weird fancies is that they were intended to repre- sent in allegorical style the three temperaments — the melancholic, the sanguine, and the phlegmatic. The Diet of Augsburg, which was convened in 15 18, gave Durer a passing opportunity to depict the lineaments of the Emperor Maximilian, who gave him several sittings, and who manifested great interest in the painter. The death of the emperor in the following year, the outbreak of an epidemic in Nuremberg, together with the coronation of Charles V. at Aix-la- Chapelle, led Durer to undertake a journey to the Low Countries, in which he was accompanied by his faithful wife. He was present at the coronation and was one of the distinguished civilians whose appearance added dignity to the occasion. His diary, in which he recounts his experiences upon this journey, and which is accompanied by a multitude of wayside sketches, is still preserved, and contains, besides the dry entries of his current expenditures, most entertain- ing allusions to the distinguished people whom he met, and who received him with the utmost cordiality. Intermingled with these narrative details are out- bursts of feeling, which are provoked by passing political and ecclesiastical events, in which he took a profound interest, though he never appears to have committed himself with positive openness to the party of reform. His sympa- thies are, however, clearly shown by his writings, as well as by his works of art, to have been with the Reformers, and he lived on terms of intimacy with Eras- mus and Melancthon, of both of whom we have portraits from his hand. Durer returned from the Netherlands in 152 1, about the middle of July, and the remaining years of his life were spent in the prosecution of the art of the en- graver, in painting, and in the effort to elucidate the sciences of perspective, ge- ometry, and fortification, upon all of which he has left treatises. His labors, though they had not brought with them great wealth, had secured for him a competency, and the latter years of his life were devoted more and more to labors which, while dignified, did not tend to add greatly to his already magnificent reputation. These labors were prosecuted in spite of ever-failing health. While in the Netherlands he had contracted a malarial fever, the effects of which clung to him, in spite of the best treatment which could be secured, and left him the wreck of his former self. On April 6, 1528, death suddenly over- took him. There was not even time to summon his friends to his side before his spirit had fled. The city which had been his home from childhood was filled with mourning. They took up his remains and gently laid them to rest in the burial vault of his wife's family in the graveyard of the Church of St. John, where the setting sun pours its last glowing beams at evening over the low Franconian hill-tops. The vault has since been changed and the last resting-place of the re-