th the utter destruction
of such works.

Illustration: PLATE 26
_Behold to obey is better than sacrifice_
SAMUEL DENOUNCING SAUL
_Washed Drawing. Basel Museum_

Not the greatest of the Italians could have improved upon the
distribution and balance of this composition. The blazing background,
the sense of a densely crowded host beyond what the eye can grasp, of
captives and captors--all the stupendous crackle and roar and shout
and sudden strained silence of Saul's immediate followers--is amply
matched by those two typical protagonists, just then repeating the old
drama with varying fortunes on the world's new stage. The Secular Arm
has been short in the service of God, as interpreted by his Vicar; it
has thought, in Saul's person, to win the cause, yet spare its enemies.
Vain is it for him to run with humility, to tell what he has won and
what overcome and done. He has not destroyed All--root and branch. For
reasons of personal policy, he has given quarter. And the Priest, for
God, will have none of his well-meaning excuses, of his good intentions,
his policy, his burnt offerings of half-way measures;--"Behold to obey
is better than sacrifice," begins his fierce anathema, "and to hearken
than the fat of rams."

Doubtless the Protestant party read its own meanings into these texts,
when once the pictures were painted and paid for with seventy-two good
guldens. But two very significant facts form their own commentary. One
is that the only employment he received from the Council afterward was
to redecorate the old Laellenkoenig monstrosity on the bridge!--and the
other, that as soon as Holbein got his pay for this disgraceful
commission, a pay he was now much too hard pressed to refuse, he quietly
slipped away from Basel without taking the Council into his confidence.
Judging from his after conduct to his family, he probably left the
seventy-two guldens to support his wife and children--now four little
ones--until such time as he could send them more from England; and took
his way once more, in the late autumn of 1531, with knapsack and
paint-brushes for the journey, to a city that might give him few walls
to cover, but would certainly not set him to painting the town clock.

* * * * *

Things had changed in London also, and gravely, Holbein found, since
he had quitted Sir Thomas More's home at Chelsea with the sketch for
Erasmus, in the summer of 1528. He had barely settled hims