Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of Albrecht Dürer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil,' or Orcagna's 'Triumph of Death.' In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and told tales, till the pestilence was upon them. It has a closer resemblance to the piteous madness with which the condemned prisoners during the French Reign of Terror rehearsed the falling of the guillotine, or the terrible pageant with which the same French, as represented by their Parisian brethren, professed to hail the arrival of the cholera.
Of the 'More Family' there are so many duplicates or versions, that, as in the case of Erasmus's picture, it is hard to say which is the original picture, or whether Holbein did more than sketch the original, or merely sketch the various heads to be afterwards put together by an inferior artist. A singular distribution of the light in the best authenticated picture has been supposed to favour this conjecture. But under any supposition, this, the second of the three noted English family pictures, is of the greatest interest. I shall record a minute and curious description given of this 'More Family,' which is still in the possession of a descendant of the Mores and Ropers.
'The room which is here represented seemed to be a large dining-room. At the upper end of it stands a chamber-organ on a cupboard, with a curtain drawn before it. On each end of the cupboard, which is covered with a carpet of tapestry, stands a flower-pot of flowers, and on the cupboard are laid a lute, a base-viol, a pint pot or ewer covered in part with a cloth folded several times, and _Boetius de Consolatione Philosophiæ_, with two other books upon it. By this cupboard stands a daughter of Sir Thomas More's, putting on her right-hand glove, and having under her arm a book bound in red Turkey leather and gilt, with this inscription round the outside of the cover--_Epistolica Senecæ_. Over her head is written in Latin, _Elizabeth Dancy_, daughter of Sir Thomas More, aged 21.