broken on the wheel, drowned in the Rhine, (a bad use to which to put that "excellent river,") left to starve on a gradually diminished supply of bread and water. To compel confessions, tortures inconceivably horrible were used, to which the alternative of death would have been a boon; and yet there were not wanting those among the Bâlois who would endure these torments rather than utter their own condemnation.

They were devoted to religion, and held in great reverence the pictures and images of the Saints; but not on account of any admiration of the skill of painter or sculptor; for they cared little for the arts, and were so ignorant of literature that "no one of them had ever heard of Cicero or of any other orator."

The men of Bâle were of noble presence, and dressed well, although they avoided magnificence. Only those of knightly rank wore purple; the wealthy burghers confined themselves to black velvet; but their wives, on fête-days, blazed in splendid silk and satin and jewels. The boys went with naked feet, and, adds the reverend divine, the women wore upon their white legs only shoes. There was no distinction of age by costume, among the women,—a very great singularity in those days, when every stage and rank of life was marked by some peculiar style of dress; but in Bâle the face alone distinguished the young girl from the matron of mature years. It may, however, be doubted by some, whether this is peculiar to the town of Bâle or to the time of Sylvius. The men were addicted to voluptuous pleasures; they lived sumptuously, and passed a long time at table. In the words of our churchman, "They were too much devoted to Father Bacchus and Dame Venus,"—faults which they deemed venial. But he adds, that they were jealous of their honor, and held to what they promised; they would rather be upright than merely seem to be so. Though provident, they were content, unless very poor.

Another peculiarity of Bâle: its clocks were one hour ahead of all others, and so continued at least till the middle of the last century. This of course depended on no difference of time; it was merely that when, for instance, at mid-day, the clocks of neighboring towns struck twelve, the clocks of Bâle struck one. The origin of this seeming effort to hasten him who usually moves rapidly enough for us all is lost in obscurity.

And now why is it that, we have gone back four hundred years and more, to linger thus long with the Secretary of the Great Ecclesiastical Council of Bâle, in that quaint and queer old town, with its half French, half German look, its grand, grotesque old churches, hung round with knightly shields and filled with women, each in a pulpit of her own, its stork-crowned roofs, its houses blazing with wrought gold and silver, its threescore fountains, and the magnificence in which, without a court, it rivalled the richest capitals of Italy, its noble-spirited and pleasure-loving, but simple-minded and unlearned burghers, its white-limbed beauties, and its deceitful clocks? It is not because that town is now one of the principal ribbon-factories of the world, and exports to this country alone over $1,200,000 worth yearly; although some fair readers may suppose that an all-sufficient reason,—and some of their admirers and protectors, too, for that matter. Think of it! nearly one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of ribbons coming to us every year from a single town in Switzerland! The statement is enough to carry horror and dismay to the heart and the pocket of every father and brother, and above all, of every husband, actual or possible, who hears of it. It is a godsend to the protectionists, who might reëdify their party on the basis of a prohibitory tariff against ribbons. If they were successful, their success would be brilliant; for if our fair tyrants could not get ribbons—those necessaries of life—from Bâle in Switzerland, they would tease and coax us to build them a Bâle in America; and we should do it.

We have gone back to the old Bâle of four hundred and twenty years ago, because there, and not long after that time,—about 1498,—according to general belief, Hans Holbein was born; because these were the surroundings under the influence of which he grew to manhood; and because there, about sixty years before his birth, a Dance of Death was painted, the most ancient and important of which we have any remaining memorial. This Dance was painted upon the wall of the churchyard of the Dominican Convent in Great Bâle, by order of the very Ecclesiastical Council of which our Aeneas Sylvius was Secretary, and in commemoration of a plague which visited the town during the sitting of that Council, and carried off many of its members.

What is a Dance of Death? and why should Death be painted dancing? Some readers may think of it as a frantic revel of grim skeletons, or perhaps—like me in my boyish musings—imagine nameless shapes with Death and Hell gleaming in their faces, each clasping a mortal beguiled to its embrace, all flitting and floating round and round to unearthly music, and gradually receding through vast mysterious gloom till they are lost in its horrible obscurity.

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 Bâle, 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