The Project Gutenberg eBook, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March,
1859, by Various

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Title: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859

Author: Various

Release Date: March 23, 2004 [eBook #11687]
[Date last updated: July 24, 2005]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOLUME 3, ISSUE
17, MARCH, 1859***

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. III.--MARCH, 1859.--NO. XVII.

HOLBEIN AND THE DANCE OF DEATH.

At the northwest corner of Switzerland, just on the turn of the Rhine
from its westward course between Germany and Switzerland, to run
northward between Germany and France, stands the old town of Bale. It is
nominally Swiss; but its situation on the borders of three countries,
and almost in them all, has given to the place itself and to its
inhabitants a somewhat heterogeneous air. "It looks," says one
traveller, "like a stranger lately arrived in a new colony, who,
although he may have copied the dress and the manner of those with whom
he has come to reside, wears still too much of his old costume to pass
for a native, and too little to be received as a stranger." Perhaps we
may get a better idea of the mixed nationality of the place by imagining
a Swiss who speaks French with a German accent.

Bale is an ancient city; though Rome was bending under the weight of
more than a thousand years when the Emperor Valentinian built at this
angle of the river a fortress which was called the Basilia. Houses soon
began to cluster round it upon the ruins of an old Helvetian town, and
thus Basel or Bale obtained its existence and its name. Bale suffered
many calamities. War, pestilence, and earthquake alternately made it
desolate. Whether we must enumerate among its misfortunes a Grand
Ecclesiastical Council which assembled there in 1431, and sat for
seventeen years, deposing one infallible Pope, and making another
equally infallible, let theological disputants decide. But the
assembling of this Council was of some