"age is as a lusty winter,
Frosty, but kindly."

There is an intensity of expression in the clear, deep-set eye, a shrewd
observant look in the entire features, while it shows a capacity of
forehead that will make Hans pass muster with modern phrenologists. The
cobbler-bard wrote and sung, and mended his neighbours' boots in an
unpretending domicile in a street leading from the principal market,
which street now goes by his name. Since his time the house has been
almost rebuilt and entirely new fronted. Its old features have been
preserved in an etching by Fleischmann, after a sketch by J. A. Klein,
at which period it was a beershop known by the sign of the "Golden
Bear." Hans died full of years and honour in the year 1576, and is
buried with the great men of his city in the cemetery of St. John.

[Illustration: Fig. 254.--The House of Hans Sachs.]

The domestic life of the old Nuernbergers seems to have been
characterised by honourable simplicity, and their posterity appear to
follow laudably in their footsteps. They delight in the antiquity of
their city, and reverently preserve the relics of their past glories.
Their houses seem built for a past generation, their public edifices for
the Middle Ages; their galleries abound in the art of the fifteenth
century, and admit nothing more modern than the seventeenth. In the old
garden upon the castle bastion is a quaint quadrangular tower[250-*]
having its entrance therefrom, and this has been fitted up with antique
furniture, to give a true idea of the indoor life of Duerer's days. It
contains a hall hung with tapestries, from which a staircase leads to a
suite of rooms, one fitted as a kitchen, another as a music-room, filled
with the most quaint and curious antique instruments, which have ceased
"discoursing most eloquent music" for the last two hundred years. The
third room (a view of which we engrave) is a boudoir, containing the
large antique German stove, built up with ornamental tiles cast in
relief, with stories from bible history of saints, and arabesque. Beside
it is a bronze receptacle for water, shaped like a huge acorn, the tap
having a grotesque head, and the spigot being a small seated figure;
this was gently turned when wanted, and a thin stream of water trickled
over the hands into the basin beneath; an embroidered napkin hangs
beside it; and above it is the old-fashioned set of four hour-glasses,
so graduated that each ran out a quarter