Thus, while in Flanders painters and etchers like Jan Fyt carried on in their animal pieces the tradition of Rubens and Snyders, a totally different mode of animal painting and etching was springing up in Holland. “Pastoral,” it is most convenient to call it; but it is not pastoral in the same sense that the word has come to have, as applied to certain types of poetry, whether the _Idylls_ of Theocritus or the _Eclogues_ of Virgil. There, as with the early painters of animals, the human interest is the preoccupying interest; and the poet sings of the peasant’s life in the fields, his industries, his pleasures, his loves and quarrels, either from native love and knowledge of that life, or in a desire no less genuine, if expressed through forms of more or less artificial colouring and outline, for the real simplicity of the country. It is the herdsman, not his herd, that is the pastoral poet’s theme. Now, for the first time, the artist disengages himself from the point of view of man, and effaces himself before the dumb life he contemplates. Already, in the engravings of Lucas van Leyden, who, by his early maturity and his early death, his gentle nature and his exquisite skill, seems to stand as a prototype of Paul Potter--a kind of foreshadowing of this attitude appears. But not till the seventeenth century does the vein begin to be developed. Then, by rapid degrees, not through any single influence, but communicated imperceptibly as if “in the air,” the tradition grows. II Moses van Uytenbroeck and Claes Moeyart, whose etchings in the style of Elsheimer were mentioned earlier, both produced a certain number of purely pastoral plates. Of Uytenbroeck, we have a set of groups of animals with backgrounds of Campagna landscape, which seem to date from early in the century. And in the later manner of Moeyart, dated 1638, is a group of cattle, sheep, and goats, under shady trees, in a conventional landscape but with an unidealised Dutch herdsman. Neither of these men etched cattle with much knowledge or spirit, though Moeyart was an artist of many-sided talent, and painted pictures that are excellent in their way. Considerably better is an etching by Jan Gerritz Bleecker, also dated 1638. It is a group of cattle with a cowherd piping, conceived in the pastoral vein of Potter’s _Shepherd_. Here, already, the interest of the artist begins to centre on the animals. In Pieter de Laer this interest is still more frank. Born before 1613, de Laer found early a home in Italy, where his pictures were widely appreciated. In the same year that we have just mentioned, 1638, he, too, published a set of etchings of animals, in which attitude and action are caught with far more vivacity and truth than hitherto, while the design--though coarsely bitten--is light and free, compared with earlier work. Another set of horses, which probably followed this, is the prototype of studies like those of Potter’s.