THE BEGINNING OF LINE ENGRAVING AND ETCHING IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND. FIRST ATTEMPTS AT MEZZOTINT. A GLANCE AT ENGRAVING IN EUROPE BEFORE 1660. The French were unable to distinguish themselves early in the art of engraving, as the conditions under which they laboured were different from those which obtained in Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries: the homes, all three of them, of schools of painting. From the thirteenth century onwards, the architects and sculptors of France had produced an unbroken succession of good things; but the origin of her school of painting is not nearly so remote, nor has it such sustained importance. Save for the unknown glass-painters of her cathedrals, for the miniaturists who preceded and succeeded Jean Fouquet, and for the artists in chalks whose work is touched with so peculiar a charm and so delicate an originality, she can boast of no great painter before Jean Cousin. And the art of engraving could scarcely have flourished when, as yet, the art of painting had scarcely existed. [Illustration: FIG. 69.--NOEL GARNIER. Grotesques.] [Illustration: FIG. 70.--JEAN DUVET. The Power of Royalty.] Wood-cutting, it is true, was practised in France with a certain success, as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, and even a little before that. The "Danses macabres"--those aids to morality so popular in mediæval times--the illustrated "Books of Hours," and other compilations besides, printed with figures and tail-pieces, in Lyons or Paris, give earnest of the unborn masterpieces of Geofroy Tory, of Jean Cousin himself, and of sundry other draughtsmen and wood-cutters of the reigns of François I. and Henri II. But, as practised by goldsmiths, such as Jean Duvet and Étienne Delaune, and by painters of the Fontainebleau school like René Boyvin and Geofroy Dumonstier, line engraving and etching were still no more than a means of popularising extravagant imitations of Italian work. The prints of Nicolas Beatrizet, who had been the pupil of Agostino Musi at Rome, and those of another engraver of Lorraine, whose name has been Italianised into Niccolò della Casa, appear to have been produced with the one object of deifying the spirit of sham, and converting French engravers to that religion to which French painters had apostatised with so much ill-fortune under the influence of the Italians brought in by Francis I. [Illustration: FIG. 71.--ÉTIENNE DELAUNE. Adam and Eve driven from Paradise.] [Illustration: FIG. 72.--ÉTIENNE DELAUNE. Mirror.] [Illustration: FIG. 73.--ANDROUET DU CERCEAU. Ornamented Vase.]