gh a trap-door. In fine dramatic unconsciousness to the last
moment, like the clown in a pantomime, the child-boiler was represented
as still industriously chopping up a child, pieces of which, ready for
the pot, lay here and there on the table in the middle of the picture.
The child-boiler's wife, however, just as she was taking the top off the
pot to put the meat in, had caught a glimpse of the foremost policeman,
and stopped, as much in rage as in consternation.

167. Now it is precisely the same feeling, or want of feeling, in the
lower Italian (nor always in the lower classes only) which makes him
demand the kind of subject for his secular drama; and the Crucifixion
and Pieta for his religious drama. The only part of Christianity he can
enjoy is its horror; and even the saint and saintess are not always
denying themselves severely, either by the contemplation of torture, or
the companionship with disease.

Nevertheless, we must be cautious, on the other hand, to allow full
value to the endurance, by tender and delicate persons, of what is
really loathsome or distressful to them in the service of others; and I
think this picture of Holbein's indicative of the exact balance and
rightness of his own mind in this matter, and therefore of his power to
conceive a true saint also. He had to represent St. Catherine's chief
effort;--he paints her ministering to the sick, and, among them, is a
leper; and finding it thus his duty to paint leprosy, he courageously
himself studies it from the life. Not to insist on its horror; but to
assert it, to the needful point of fact, which he does with medical
accuracy.

Now here is just a case in which science, in a subordinate degree, is
really required for a spiritual and moral purpose. And you find Holbein
does not shrink from it even in this extreme case in which it is most
painful.

168. If, therefore, you _do_ find him in other cases not using it, you
may be sure he knew it to be unnecessary.

Now it may be disputable whether in order to draw a living Madonna, one
needs to know how many ribs she has; but it would have seemed
indisputable that in order to draw a skeleton, one must know how many
ribs _it_ has.

Holbein is par excellence the draughtsman of skeletons. His painted
Dance of Death was, and his engraved Dance of Death is, principal of
such things, without any comparison or denial. He draws skeleton after
skeleton, in every possible gesture; but never so much as cou