The circumstances of its publication are set forth by 'the anonymous author' (William Combe) in one of his brief explanatory 'introductions.'
'The Dance of Death is a subject so well known to have employed the talents of distinguished painters in the age of superstition, that little is required to recall it to the recollection of the antiquary, the lover of the arts, and the artist.
'Holbein is more particularly recorded as having employed his pencil upon a work of this kind; but, without entering into a detail of those masters who have treated the subject of the Dance of Death, the present object is merely to attract the public attention to the subject itself. Few remains are now visible of the original paintings which represented it, but they have been perpetuated by the more durable skill of the engraver, and the volumes which contain them in the latter form are to be found on the shelves of the learned and curious collector. The subject is the same in them all, but varied according to the fancy of the painters, or perhaps from local circumstances attached to the places which they were respectively intended to decorate. The predominant feature is, without exception, the representation of one or more skeletons, sometimes indeed in grotesque attitudes, and with rather a comic effect, conducting persons of all ranks, conditions, and ages to the tomb.
'Mr. Rowlandson had contemplated the subject with the view of applying it exclusively to the manners, customs, and character of this country. His pencil has accordingly produced the designs, which, in the order they were delivered to me, I have accompanied with metrical illustrations, a mode of proceeding which has been sanctioned by the success of our joint labours in the Tour of Doctor Syntax. The first volume, therefore, of the English Dance of Death, which has appeared in twelve successive numbers, is now presented to the public in a collected form. The second volume will follow in the same mode of publication. Though the name and tenour of the work is borrowed, it may, perhaps, be allowed some claim to local and characteristic originality. The most serious subject attached to our nature is, indeed, presented with a degree of familiar pleasantry which is not common to it. But in this particular the example of the painters who first suggested and propagated the idea has been followed, and no other vivacity has been displayed in these pages than has been found on the walls of edifices dedicated to religion, and was thus represented in the cloisters of St. Paul's, before the sacrilegious pride of the Protector Somerset caused the dilapidation of that appendage to the metropolitan church of the kingdom. But I am not afraid of being accused by reflecting minds of having introduced an unbecoming levity into the following pages, for that writer may surely claim the approbation of the grave and the good who familiarises the mind with Death by connecting it in any way with the various situations and circumstances of life.
'The Author.'
The Frontispiece represents the grim form of the spectral foe, his skeleton frame calmly seated on the globe, his grim jaw resting on his arm, and his elbow on his knees; at his feet is the hourglass he has borrowed from Time; he wears the crown, which indicates his universal sovereignty, and in his grasp is the dart which must touch all humanity in turn, and speed them hence. A pipe and tabor are suspended overhead, and bats are flitting above. Round the effigy of destruction are strewn the means wherewith his ends are wrought. A portly register, 'Death's Dance,' is open; beside it are the symbolical instruments of his decrees—pistols, bullets, daggers, guns, dice, cards, the executioner's axe, a barrel of gunpowder, compounds, drugs, opium, arsenic, mercury, and the various fatal agencies arrayed against the natural preservation of life.
A vignette on the engraved Title-page further elucidates the uses of Death's pipe and tabor. The grim King is enjoying himself in his own fashion, dancing his rattling bones right merrily to his own music, which he is congenially piping forth in a cemetery; while the fatal hourglass and dart are laid aside upon the slab of a grave. Death's grim legions, the skeleton messengers of his decrees, are dancing fantastic figures with fiendish gaiety among the tombstones, performing ghastly quadrilles sufficient to scare an involuntary beholder out of his senses.
Plate 1. Time and Death.
Time and Death their thoughts impart,
On works of Learning and of Art.
The first scene, which we presume is simply introductory, and that Death and his comrade, old Time, have dropped in unprofessionally or as critics, represents two youthful students of the past. The apartment is surrounded with shelves, loaded with piles of busts and figures of the illustrious dead, the effigies of renowned poets, generals, philosophers, statesmen, and all classes of the community, from the earliest times, being presented indiscriminately. From these memorials the artist is sketching the portrait of a departed worthy. A literary gentleman, of a somewhat conventional type, with an open collar, a flowing dressing-gown, slippers, and general easy looseness of attire, having papers before him, and various manuscripts and ponderous volumes scattered around, is about, with a flourish of his quill, to record his impressions of the past; old Father Time, with his bald crown, and grey beard and spectacles on nose, is leaning on his scythe; while the grim King of Terrors is grinning by his side, curiously peering over the shoulders of the unconscious workers, and suggesting—