Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 17, March, 1859

Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 17,
March, 1859

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17,
March,
1859, by Various
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859
Author: Various
Release Date: March 23, 2004 [eBook #11687]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC
MONTHLY, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 17, MARCH, 1859***
E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen, and Project
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders

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 Rhine
from its westward course between Germany and Switzerland, to run
northward between Germany and France, stands the old town of Bâle.
It is nominally Swiss; but its situation on the borders of three countries,

and almost in them all, has given to the place itself and to its
inhabitants a somewhat heterogeneous air. "It looks," says one traveller,
"like a stranger lately arrived in a new colony, who, although he may
have copied the dress and the manner of those with whom he has come
to reside, wears still too much of his old costume to pass for a native,
and too little to be received as a stranger." Perhaps we may get a better
idea of the mixed nationality of the place by imagining a Swiss who
speaks French with a German accent.
Bâle is an ancient city; though Rome was bending under the weight of
more than a thousand years when the Emperor Valentinian built at this
angle of the river a fortress which was called the Basilia. Houses soon
began to cluster round it upon the ruins of an old Helvetian town, and
thus Basel or Bâle obtained its existence and its name. Bâle suffered
many calamities. War, pestilence, and earthquake alternately made it
desolate. Whether we must enumerate among its misfortunes a Grand
Ecclesiastical Council which assembled there in 1431, and sat for
seventeen years, deposing one infallible Pope, and making another
equally infallible, let theological disputants decide. But the assembling
of this Council was of some service to us; for its Secretary, Aeneas
Sylvius, (who, like the saucy little _prima donna_, was one of the 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 body to the
Cardinal St. Angeli, has left a description of Bâle as it was in 1436.
After telling us that the town is situated upon that "excellent river, the
Rhine, which divides it into two parts, called Great Bâle and Little Bâle,
and that these are connected by a bridge which the river rising from its
bed sometimes carries off," he, naturally enough for an ecclesiastic and
a future Pope, goes on to say, that in Great Bâle, which is far more
beautiful and magnificent than Little Bâle, there are handsome and
commodious churches; and he naively adds, that, "although these are
not adorned with marble, and are built of common stone, they are much
frequented by the people." The women of Bâle, following the
devotional instincts of their sex, were the most assiduous attendants
upon these churches; and they consoled themselves for the absence of
marble, which the good. Aeneas Sylvius seems to imply would partly
have excused them for staying away, by an arrangement in itself as odd

as in Roman Catholic places of worship--to their honor--it is, and ever
was, unusual. Each of them performed her devotions in a kind of
inclosed bench or solitary pew. By most of these the occupant was
concealed only to the waist when she stood up at the reading of the
Gospel; some allowed only their heads to appear; and others of the fair
owners were at once so devout, so cruel, and so self-denying as to shut
out the eyes of the world entirely and at all times. But instances of this
remorseless mortification of the flesh, seem to have been exceedingly
rare. Queer enough these structures were, and sufficiently gratifying to
the pride and provocative of the envy which the beauties of Bâle
(avowedly) went to churches in which there was no marble to mortify.
For they were of different heights, according to the rank of the
occupant. A simple burgher's wife took but a step toward heaven when
she went to pray; a magistrate's of the lower house, we must suppose,