Holbein's Leg.--I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because
under the Rubric of the I would come the _Invalides_, of whom I had
meant to assert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become
full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs
they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology
and Dietetics of the military chest.--But I have pitied these (half)
poor devils too much to do it.
The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have
been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle
only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circumstance that drove his
genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold
recess-hours therein,--namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner,
whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and
swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs--for that
was all of the painter that could be seen--were standing or staggering
in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came
stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him
and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made
a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the
owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs,
whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved
to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a
hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door
below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were
painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but,
as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in
one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master
so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up
there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the
knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting,
was again guzzling in an _alibi_.
I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a
moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.
I meant to have appended a further history of the princely portraits
which hang there behind the President in the Session-Chambers instead
of the originals, by way of casting-votes,--but I should disturb the
connection; here, too, was formerly the end of the First Part.