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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 Rhinefrom its westward course between Germany and Switzerland, to runnorthward between Germany and France, stands the old town of Bâle. It isnominally Swiss; but its situation on the borders of three countries,and almost in them all, has given to the place itself and to itsinhabitants a somewhat heterogeneous air. "It looks," says onetraveller, "like a stranger lately arrived in a new colony, who,although he may have copied the dress and the manner of those with whomhe has come to reside, wears still too much of his old costume to passfor a native, and too little to be received as a stranger." Perhaps wemay get a better idea of the mixed nationality of the place by imagininga Swiss who speaks French with a German accent.
Bâle is an ancient city; though Rome was bending under the weight ofmore than a thousand years when the Emperor Valentinian built at thisangle of the river a fortress which was called the Basilia. Houses soonbegan to cluster round it upon the ruins of an old Helvetian town, andthus Basel or Bâle obtained its existence and its name. Bâle sufferedmany calamities. War, pestilence, and earthquake alternately made itdesolate. Whether we must enumerate among its misfortunes a GrandEcclesiastical Council which assembled there in 1431, and sat forseventeen years, deposing one infallible Pope, and making anotherequally infallible, let theological disputants decide. But theassembling of this Council was of some service to us; for its Secretary,Aeneas Sylvius, (who, like the saucy little prima donna, was one ofthe noble and powerful Italian family, the Piccolomini, and afterward,as Pope Pius II., wore the triple crown which St. Peter did not wear,)in his Latin dedication of a history of the transactions of that bodyto the Cardinal St. Angeli, has left a description of Bâle as it was in1436.
After telling us that the town is situated upon that "excellent river,the Rhine, which divides it into two parts, called Great Bâle and LittleBâle, and that these are connected by a bridge which the river risingfrom its bed sometimes carries off," he, naturally enough for anecclesiastic and a future Pope, goes on to say, that in Great Bâle,which is far more beautiful and magnificent than Little Bâle, there arehandsome and commodious churches; and he naively adds, that, "althoughthese are not adorned with marble, and are built of common stone, theyare much frequented by the people." The women of Bâle, following thedevotional instincts of their sex, were the most assiduous attendantsupon these churches; and they consoled themselves for the absence ofmarble, which the good Aeneas Sylvius seems to imply would partly haveexcused them for staying away, by an arrangement in itself as odd as inRoman Catholic places of worship—to their honor—it is, and ever was,unusual. Each of them performed her devotions in a kind of inclosedbench or solitary pew. By most of these the occupant was concealedonly to the waist when she stood up at the reading of the Gospel; someallowed only their heads to appear; and others of the fair owners wereat once so devout, so cruel, and so self-denying as to shut out theeyes of the world entirely and at all times. But instances of thisremorseless mortification of the flesh, seem to have been exceedinglyrare. Queer enough the