hoary head, full of meditative repose. This
figure represents the phlegmatic temperament, which reviews its own
thoughts in tranquil reflection. The second picture shows the outward
operation of the conviction thus attained and its relation to daily
life. S. Mark in the background is the man of sanguine temperament; he
looks boldly round, and appears to speak to his hearers with animation,
earnestly urging them to share those advantages which he has himself
derived from the Holy Scriptures. S. Paul, on the contrary, in the
foreground, holds the book and sword in his hands; he looks angrily and
severely over his shoulder, ready to defend the Word, and to annihilate
the blasphemer with the sword of God's power. He is the representative
of the choleric temperament.

We know of no important work of a later date than that just described.
His portrait in a woodcut of the year 1527 represents him earnest and
serious in demeanour, as would naturally follow from his advancing age
and the pressure of eventful times. His head is no longer adorned with
those richly flowing locks, on which in his earlier days he had set so
high a value, as we learn from his pictures and from jests still
recorded of him. With the departure of Hans Holbein to England in 1528
and the death of Albert Duerer in the same year, that excellence to which
they had raised German art passed away, and centuries saw no sign of its
revival.

Of HANS HOLBEIN, born at Augsburg in 1498, we shall have more to say in
a later chapter, when considering the origins of English portraiture.
But as in the case of Van Dyck, and in fact of every great portrait
painter, his excellence in this particular branch of his art was but one
result of his being a born artist and first exercising his talents in a
much wider field. In Holbein the realistic tendency of the German School
attained its highest development, and he may, next to Duerer, be
pronounced the greatest master in it. While Duerer's art exhibits a close
affinity with the religious ideas of the Middle Ages, Holbein appears to
have been imbued with more modern and more material sentiments, and
accordingly we find him excelling Duerer in closeness and delicacy of
observation in the delineation of nature. A proof of this is afforded by
the evidence of Erasmus, who said that as regards the portraits painted
of him by both these artists, that by Holbein was the most like. In
feeling for beauty of form, also in grace of movem