The line of really great Italian painters went out with the sixteenth century. Domenichino, indeed, Annibale Carracci, and a few others, glorified the century that followed; but their works, although full of sentiment, skill, and ability, are quite as much affected by the pernicious eclecticism of the period and by the general decline in taste. After them all the arts declined. Sculpture and architecture became more and more degraded under the influence of Bernini and Borromini. Athirst for novelty of any kind, people had gradually come to think the most extravagant fancies clever. To bring the straight line into greater disrepute, statues and bas-reliefs were tortured as by a hurricane; attitudes, draperies, and even immovable accessories were all perturbed and wavering. The engravers were no better than the painters, sculptors, and architects. By dint of exaggerating the idealistic creed, they had fallen into mere insanity; and in the midst of this degradation of art, they aimed at nothing save excitement and novelty, so that their invention was only shown in irregular or overlengthy lines, and their impetuosity in bad drawing. Daily wandering further from the paths of the masters, the Italian engravers at last attained, through the abuse of method, a complete oblivion of the essential conditions of their art; so that with few exceptions, till the end of the eighteenth century, nothing is to be found save barren sleight-of-hand in the works of that very school, which, in the days of Marc Antonio and his pupils, had been universally triumphant. [Illustration: FIG. 80.--ABRAHAM BOSSE. From the Set entitled "Le Jardin de la Noblesse Française."] After the Little Masters, inheritors of some of the genius, skill, and renown of Albert Dürer, Germany had given birth to a fair number of clever engravers, the majority of whom had left their country. Some of them, indistinguishable to-day from the second generation of Marc Antonio's disciples, had, as we said, abandoned the national style for the Italian; others had settled in France or in the Low Countries. The Thirty Years' War accomplished the ruin of German art, which before long was represented only in Frankfort, where Matthew Mérian of Basle, and his pupils, with certain engravers from neighbouring countries, had taken refuge. Whilst engraving was declining in Italy and Germany, the English school was springing into being. Though at first of small importance, the beginnings and early essays of the school are such as may hardly pass without remark.