In Mistress Margaret's Libellus, Erasmus appears chiefly as a fellow of infinite jest, but wise withal, chatting at table as he chats in his letters, and saying, indeed, much that we have under the safe warrant of his own pen.
If Erasmus was the typical scholar of that age which stood between the Renaissance and the Reformation, Hans Holbein was typical of its art. In his hand painting has come down from its high estate, its Madonnas and its great Doges, its classic pageants and its heroic legends, and treats of common life as men saw it every day. The German artist descended from the lofty themes which had inspired the great master of Italy, and took even the humbler work of illustrating books. Botticelli, it is true, had drawn studies of the Divina Commedia, but Holbein was ready to work for a printer, and to design letters and tail-pieces for the Libelli of his friends. It was through Froben, the great Basle painter, no doubt, that More and Erasmus and Holbein first came together. Holbein illustrated the Utopia, and came to England with an introduction from the author of the Encomium Moriæ. He was thirty years younger than the Dutch scholar, and twenty years younger than More, but they became his chiefest friends. He tarried some while in More's house, and it was there that he drew some of those marvellous sketches now preserved at Windsor, that give us our truest knowledge of the Court of Henry VIII. Fisher and Warham, the Earl of Surrey and Sir Nicholas Poins, Colet and Godsalve, each in their way representative of a class, but keenly individual and vigorously characteristic, are preserved for us by those few sharp, bold strokes with a power and reality which no portrait-painter has ever surpassed. The luxury and the meanness, the treachery and the cold selfishness, that form the background of the great struggles of the sixteenth century are expressed for all time in those master-sketches which Holbein drew and Margaret Roper, it may be, often looked upon.
And for More's own household we have, besides the letters and the memoirs, the very form and pressure from the great artist's own hand. The original design for the famous picture of the patriarchal family, the three generations living together in love and reverence in their "Platonic Academy," is at Basle; but in England, at Nostell and at Cokethorpe, we have very fair presentments of the great picture as it must have been. More sits by his shrewd old father in his habit as he lived. The gentle, delicate son stands by, book in hand, and near his affianced bride. The stepmother sits stately at one side of the group, and the daughters cluster around. The sorrowful eyes of the great Chancellor, and his pensive, meditative brow, speaking sound conscience and a firm resolve, are not lightly to be forgotten; and the plain, homely face of Margaret Roper, refined and thoughtful through all its solid strength, may well linger in the memories of those who know her beautiful life.
To the number of these Miss Manning's book has added many. She teaches others to love her heroes because she loved them herself. Erasmus and More and Holbein, Gunnel and Clement, Will Roper and faithful Patteson, she knew as if she had lived among them. These, and such as these, are the characters of whom she so skilfully drew portraits which were much more than the fictions of imagination. She wrote from a considerable knowledge of the literature of the time, and with a genuine love of all things beautiful and good. In her style she imitated the quaintness of old English without any precise restriction to the period of Henry VIII.; and in the same way the vocabulary and the spelling which she adopted were not claimed by her as minutely accurate. Over her book and her characters I would gladly linger. But the first speaks for itself, and my office is only to direct readers to it; and for the characters, what I can say is said in my own Life of the great Chancellor and Saint himself, the father of the gentle Margaret whom Miss Manning so happily drew.
But there is a special feature in this reprint of which I must needs say a word. Mr. Herbert Railton and Mr. John Jellicoe show that they too are skilled in the drawing of imaginary portraits—that they have seen More's house as indeed we think it must have been, and his family in their habits as they lived. As the barge brings us past old London Bridge to the Chelsea stairs, the mansion of the Chancellor stands before us in the warm sun as when Ellis Heywood saw it three centuries and a half ago. The children play in the garden, the Jew tells his story, the peacocks flaunt their gay colours, and More reads his old books and cracks his jests, as if the old time had come back again. Bright pictures indeed, and a worthy setting; and the old story is told anew as More himself and Holbein might have loved to think of it. But good wines need no bush, and good pictures no prologue.
W. H. HUTTON.
The Great House, Burford,
July 9, 1895.