all that kind of which Edward Young, in his Night Thoughts, afterwards said: "All men think all men mortal, but themselves"), and especially to the rich, by introducing such pictures into churches all over the country, in small villages and large towns and cities alike, may be summed up in the following jingling Mediaeval Latin ("Leonine ") hexameters :

"O dominus dives, non omni tempore vives;

Fac bona dum vivis, post mortem vivere si vis."

FIG. 12. The Three Dead meeting the Pope and Ecclesiastics.
Original drawing in the British Museum.

The same idea is summed up by William Dunbar (about 1465 to 1530), in one of the stanzas of his magnificent "Lament for the Makaris "70 (with the refrain, Timor mortis conturbat me), which breathes the spirit of the earlier "Dance of Death" and similar admonitory poems and paintings:"Our pleasance here is all vain glory,

This false world is but transitory,

The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee [sly].
Timor mortis conturbat me."

70 Written about 1508. "Makaris" is an old Scotch form of "makers," i.e. poets. (Cf. Greek TonTs = a maker or a poet.)

With this may be compared the later famous dirge-like poem by James Shirley (1596-1666), commencing :

"The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;

Death lays his icy hand on kings."

In the Mediaeval "morality play," entitled The Summoning of Everyman," recently revived in London, Fellowship and Kindred, Worldly Possessions (Goods), Strength, Beauty, Knowledge, Discretion, can none of them accompany Everyman on his last journey. "Good Deeds" alone stands by him and promises to speak for him. According to the sentiment of the play in question, knowledge and discretion should furnish every man with good deeds in this life, and these, rather than mere faith, are to obtain happiness for him in the life to come. "Hie weislich, dort glücklich" ("Here on earthprudently, there-after death-happily ") was a Mediaeval motto of the Bernstorff family. I must now again refer to Albrecht Dürer's famous engraving (1513) of "The Knight, Death and the Devil." In lonely scenery Death explains the significance of an unpleasant emblem of mortality (an exposed human skull) to a knightly horseman in splendid armour. Death is on a pale horse, and the Devil is behind him as in the Apocalypse (Revelation, vi. 8). But the "true knight" (who carries a fox's skin on his lance-possibly either as an emblem of sagacity or as having overcome the cunning of the fox) will proceed to the end and do his duty, not dismayed by threats of

A copy printed by John Scot, in London, about the year 1530, has on the title-page the device of "Everyman" being summoned by a skeleton-like figure rising from a tomb.

death, nor disturbed by the unclean suggestions of the swinish devil (see further on, Fig. 37):

"Wer dem Tod nicht in's Auge schauen kann,

Der ist fürwahr kein rechter mann.'

1972

A variety in the representation of the legend of the three dead and three living is furnished by a most interesting Italian picture of the fourteenth-century

(Fig. 13), preserved in the Museo Civico at Pisa. On this picture the three living men in the course of their ride come upon three seated females instead of the usual "skin and skeleton" dead men. Dr. W. F. Storck,73 to

Cf. as Schiller (Wallensteins Lager, Elfter Auftritt) expresses it :-
"Der dem Tod ins Angesicht schauen kann,
Der Soldat allein, ist der freie Mann."

"Storck, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, vol. xxxiii. p. 493.

whom I am indebted for permission to reproduce his illustration, points out that the allegorical figures of the three women who replace the "three dead," are derived by the early Italian Renaissance artist from the old heathen idea of the three Fates (Parcae or Moirae): Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Dr. Storck also refers to analogous symbolical representations of the three Fates. The Renaissance artists of the "Triumph of Death" and the "Triumph of Fame over Death," after Petrarch's Trionfi, frequently introduced the three Fates into their designs to replace the Mediaeval figure of death; but to this subject I shall return further on.74

We now come to the question: What was the origin of the Mediaeval and later representation of death as a skeleton or a "skin-and-bone figure," the German Hautskelett? It is, of course, in the first place, quite obvious that this Christian demon-like, or gruesome harlequin-like, personification of death, or "King Death," is merely taken from the animated skeleton-like or shrivelled corpse-like figures representing the dead themselves (or their ghosts), as in the pictures of the Mediaeval tale of "the Three Dead and the Three Living." In either case, both when the skeleton, or Hautskelett, was used in such pictures to represent a personification of death, and when it represented merely a dead person (or his ghost), the Mediaeval significance

74 In regard to female figures of the "skin and skeleton type" representing a kind of mixture of the Mediaeval representation of Death and the Renaissance idea of Atropos, see Dr. Theodor Frimmel, Mittheilungen d. k. k. Central-Commission der Denkmale, Vienna, New Series, 1885, vol. xi. p. lxxxviii. Death is represented by an old woman with scythe and coffin in a miniature in one of the manuscripts of the A. H. Huth Bequest in the British Museum (see the official descriptive catalogue of the Huth Bequest issued by the British Museum).

of the representation was intended to be a memento mori one. The "Dance of the Dead" (see Fig. 14), in the

FIG. 14.-A "Dance of the Dead," from a woodcut of the Nuremberg Chronicle (copy in the British Museum), published in 1493 by Anthoni Koberger of Nuremberg, with the help of a physician, Hartmann Schedel, and two artists, Michael Wolgemut (the master of A. Dürer) and Wilhelm Pleydenwurf. The design is very spirited, though the anatomy is not quite correct. The Latin verses below the woodcut seem to show that the design was an enlightened outcome, perhaps suggested by the physician Hartmann Schedel, of the ordinary Mediaeval teaching of the "Dance of Death."