"Heures a l'usage de Paris." Thielman Kerver's widow, 1525. 8vo.

"Missale ad usum Sarum." Paris, 1527. Folio. Three horsemen as noblemen, but without hawks or hounds.

"Enchiridion preclare ecclesie Sarum." Paris. Thielman Kerver, 1528. 32mo.

"Horae ad usum fratrum predicatorum ordinis S. Dominici." Paris. Thielman Kerver, 1529. 8vo.

"Horae ad usum Romanum." Paris. Yolande Bonhomme, widow of T. Kerver, 1531.

8vo.

"Missale ad usum Sarum." Paris. F. Regnault, 1531. Three Deaths only; different from the others.

"Prayer of Salisbury." Paris. Francois Regnault, 1531, 12mo.

"Horae ad usum Sarum." Paris. Widow of Thielman Kerver, 1532. 12mo.

"Heures a l'usage de Paris." Francois Regnault, 1535. 12mo.

"Horae ad usum Romanum." Paris. Gilles Hardouyn, 1537. 18mo. The subject is different from all the others, and very curiously treated.

"Heures a l'usage de Paris." Thielman Kerver, 1558. 12mo.

"Heures a l'usage de Rome." Paris. Thielman Kerver, 1573. 12mo.

"Heures a l'usage de Paris." Jacques Kerver, 1573. 12mo. And again, 1575.

12mo.

In "The Contemplation of Sinners," printed by Wynkyn de Worde. 4to.

All the above articles are in the collections of the author of this dissertation.

In an elegant MS. "Horae," in the Harl. Coll. No. 2917, 12mo. three Deaths appear to a pope, an emperor, and a king coming out of a church. All the parties are crowned.

At the end of Desrey's "Macabri speculum choreae mortuorum," a hermit sees a vision of a king, a legislator, and a vain female. They are all lectured by skeletons in their own likenesses.

In a manuscript collection of unpublished and chiefly pious poems of John Awdeley, a blind poet and canon of the monastery of Haghmon, in Shropshire, anno 1426, there is one on the "_trois vifs et trois morts_,"

in alliterative verses, and composed in a very grand and terrific style.

NEGRO FIGURE OF DEATH.

In some degree connected with the old painting of the Macaber Dance in the church-yard of the Innocents at Paris, was that of a black man over a vaulted roof, constructed by the celebrated N. Flamel, about the year 1390. This is supposed to have perished with the Danse Macabre; but a copy of the figure has been preserved in some of the printed editions of the dance. It exhibits a Negro blowing a trumpet, and was certainly intended as a personification of Death. In one of the oldest of the above editions he is accompanied with these verses:

CRY DE MORT.

Tost, tost, tost, que chacun savance Main a main venir a la danse De Mort, danser la convient, Tous et a plusieurs nen souvient.

Venez hommes femmes et enfans, Jeunes et vieulx, petis et grans, Ung tout seul nen eschapperoit, Pour mille escuz si les donnoit, &c.

Before the females in the dance the figure is repeated with a second "Cry de Mort."

Tost, tost, venez femmes danser Apres les hommes incontinent, Et gardez vous bien de verser, Car vous danserez vrayment; Mon cornet corne bien souvent Apres les petis et les grans.

Despecte vous legierement, Apres la pluye vient le beau temps.

These lines are differently given in the various printed copies of the Danse Macabre.

This figure is not to be confounded with an alabaster statue of Death that remained in the church-yard of the Innocents, when it was entirely destroyed in 1786. It had been usually regarded as the work of Germain Pilon, but with greater probability belonged to Francois Gentil, a sculptor at Troyes, about 1540. It was transported to Notre Dame, after being bronzed and repaired, by M. Deseine, a distinguished artist. It was saved from the fury of the iconoclast revolutionists by M. Le Noir, and deposited in the Museum which he so patriotically established in the Rue des petits Augustins, but it has since disappeared. It was an upright skeleton figure, holding in one hand a lance which pointed to a shield with this inscription:

Il n'est vivant, tant soit plein d'art, Ne de force pour resistance, Que je ne frappe de mon dart, Pour bailler aux vers leur pitance.

Priez Dieu pour les trespasses.

It is engraved in the second volume of M. Le Noir's "Musee des monumens Francais," and also in his "Histoire des arts en France," No. 91.

DANSE AUX AVEUGLES.

There is a poetical work, in some degree connected with the subject of this dissertation, that ought not to be overlooked. It was composed by one Pierre Michault, of whom little more seems to be known than that he was in the service of Charles, Count of Charolois, son of Philip le Bon, Duke of Burgundy. It is intitled "La Danse aux Aveugles," and the object of it is to show that all men are subject to the influence of three blind guides, Love, Fortune, and Death, before whom several persons are whimsically made to dance. It is a dialogue in a dream between the Author and Understanding, and the respective blind guides describe themselves, their nature, and power over mankind, in ten-line stanzas, of which the following is the first of those which are pronounced by Death:

Je suis la Mort de nature ennemie, Qui tous vivans finablement consomme, Anichillant a tous humains la vie, Reduis en terre et en cendre tout homme.

Je suis la mort qui dure me surnomme, Pour ce qu'il fault que maine tout affin; Je nay parent, amy, frere ou affin Que ne face tout rediger en pouldre, Et suis de Dieu ad ce commise affin, Que l'on me doubte autant que tonnant fouldre.

Some of the editions are ornamented with cuts, in which Death is occasionally introduced, and that portion of the work which exclusively relates to him seems to have been separately published, M. Goujet[138]

having mentioned that he had seen a copy in vellum, containing twelve leaves, with an engraving to every one of the stanzas, twenty-three in number. More is unnecessary to be added, as M. Peignot has elaborately and very completely handled the subject in his interesting "Recherches sur les Danses des Morts." Dijon, 1826. octavo.

CHAPTER XVIII.

_Errors of various writers who have introduced the subject of the Dance of Death._

To enumerate even a moiety of these mistakes would almost occupy a separate volume, but it may be as well to notice some of them which are to be found in works of common occurrence.

TRAVELLERS.--The erroneous remarks of Bishop Burnet and Mr. Coxe have been already adverted to. See pp. 79, 134, and 138.

Misson seems to regard the old Danse Macabre as the work of Holbein.

The Rev. Robert Gray, in "Letters during the course of a tour through Germany and Switzerland in the year 1791 and 1792," has stated that Mechel has engraved _Rubens's designs_ from the Dance of Death, now perishing on the walls of the church-yard of the Predicant convent, where it was sketched in 1431.

Mr. Wood, in his "View of the History of Switzerland," as quoted in the Monthly Review, Nov. 1799, p. 290, states, that "the Dance of Death in the church-yard of the Predicants has been falsely ascribed to Holbein, as it is proved that it was painted _long after the death of that artist, and not before he was born_, as the honourable Horace Walpole supposes." Here the corrector stands in need himself of correction, unless it be possible that he is not fairly quoted by the reviewer.

Miss Williams, in her Swiss tour, 1798, when speaking of the Basle Dance of Death, says it was painted by Kleber, a _pupil of Holbein_.

Those intelligent and amusing travellers, Breval, Keysler, and Blainville have carefully avoided the above strange mistakes.

WRITERS ON PAINTING AND ENGRAVING.--Meyssens, in his article for Holbein in "the effigies of the Painters," mentions his "Death's Dance, in the town-hall of Basle, the design whereof he first neatly cut in wood and afterwards painted, which appeared so fine to the learned Erasmus, &c."

English edition, 1694, p. 15.