While employed for others, Callot had worked chiefly with the graver, but now that he was his own master, he laid aside that implement, and devoted himself almost entirely to etching, in which he attained the highest proficiency. His work is remarkable for the cleanness and ease of his lines, and for the life and spirit he gave to his figures. His talent lay especially in the extraordinary skill with which he grouped together great numbers of diminutive figures, each of which preserved its proper and full action and effect. The great annual fair of the Impruneta was held with extraordinary festivities, and attended by an immense concourse of people of all classes on St. Luke's Day, the 18th of October, in the outskirts of Florence. Callot engraved a large picture of this fair, which is absolutely wonderful. The picture embraces an extensive space of ground, which is covered with hundreds of figures, all occupied, singly or in groups, in different manners, conversing, masquerading, buying and selling, playing games, and performing in various ways; each group or figure is a picture in itself. This engraving produced quite a sensation, and it was followed by other pictures of fairs, and, after his final return to Nancy, Callot engraved it anew. It was this talent for grouping large masses of persons which caused the artist to be so often employed in drawing great public ceremonies, sieges, and other warlike operations. By the duke of Florence, Cosmo II., Callot was liberally patronised and loaded with benefits, but on his death the government had to be placed in the hands of a regency, and art and literature no longer met with the same encouragement. In this state of things, Callot was found by Charles of Lorraine, afterwards duke Charles IV., and persuaded to return to his native country. He arrived at Nancy in 1622, and began to work there with greater activity even than he had displayed before. It was not long after this that he produced his sets of grotesques, the Balli (or dancers), the Gobbi (or hunchbacks), and the Beggars. The first of these sets, called in the title _Balli_, or _Cucurucu_,[92] consists of twenty-four small plates, each of them containing two comic characters in grotesque attitudes, with groups of smaller figures in the distance. Beneath the two prominent figures are their names, now unintelligible, but at that time no doubt well known on the comic stage at Florence. Thus, in the couple given in our cut No. 165, which is taken from the fourth plate of the series, the personage to the left is named Smaraolo Cornuto, which means simply Smaraolo the cuckold; and the one on the right is called Ratsa di Boio. In the original the background is occupied by a street, full of spectators, looking on at a dance of pantaloons, round one who is mounted on stilts and playing on the tabour. The couple in our cut No. 166, represents another of Callot's "Caprices," from a set differing from the first "Caprices," or the Balli.