Note 4 — LETTER LIII.

Now in Holbein’s great sermon against wealth, the engraving, in the Dance of Death, of the miser and beggar, he chose for his text the verse: “He that stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, and shall not be heard.” And he shows that the ear is thus deafened by being filled with a murmuring of its own: and how the ear thus becomes only as a twisted shell, with the sound of the far-away ocean of Hell in it for ever, he teaches us, in the figure of the fiend which I engraved for you in the seventh of these letters,4 abortive, fingerless, contemptible, mechanical, incapable;—blowing the winds of death out of its small machine: Behold, this is your God, you modern Israel, which has brought you up out of the land of Egypt in which your fathers toiled for bread with their not abortive hands; and set your feet in the large room, of Usury, and in the broad road to Death!