If, on the other hand, we must abandon this realm of fancy for the regions of fact, we might sum up the results of past progress by instancing a few prints of perfect beauty. Our own selection would be Mantegna's "Entombment;" Marc Antonio's "Massacre of the Innocents;" the "Death of the Virgin," by Martin Schongauer; Dürer's "Melancholia;" the "Calvary" of Lucas van Leyden; Rembrandt's "Christ Healing the Sick;" Bolswert's "Crown of Thorns;" the "Portrait of Rubens," by Paul Pontius, or the "Gellius de Bouma" of Cornelius Visscher; and finally, Callot's "Florentine Fair," or "Garden at Nancy," and the "Bouvier," or, better still, the "Soleil Levant" of Claude Lorraine. Happy the owner of this selection of masterpieces: the man who, better inspired than the majority of his kind, has preferred a few gems to an overgrown and unwieldy collection. CHAPTER VII. FRENCH ENGRAVERS IN THE REIGN OF LOUIS XIV. We have followed through all its stages the progress of the art of engraving, from the time of its earliest more or less successful attempts, to the time when a really important advance was accomplished. However brilliant these early phases may have been, properly speaking they include but the beginnings of the art. The epoch we are now to traverse is that of its complete development and fullest perfection. We have seen that the schools of Italy and the Low Countries had, each in its own direction, largely increased the resources of engraving, without exhausting them. The quality of drawing would seem to have been carried to an inimitable perfection in the works of Marc Antonio, had not examples of a keener sense of form and an exactness even more irreproachable been discovered in those of the French masters of the seventeenth century. The engravings produced under the direct influence of Rubens only remained the finest specimens of the science of colour and effect until the appearance of the plates engraved in Paris by Gérard Audran. Finally, though the older engravers had set themselves the task of accentuating a certain kind of beauty, suitable to the peculiar tastes and capacities of the schools to which they belonged, none of them had sought, at least with any success, to present in one whole all the different species of beauty inherent in the art. It was reserved for the French engravers of the age of Louis XIV. to unite in one supreme effort qualities which till then had seemed to exclude each other. While they proved themselves draughtsmen as skilful and colourists as good as the best of their predecessors, they excelled them in their harmonious fusion of whatever qualities are appropriate to engraving, as also in the elasticity of their theory and the all-round capacity of their method.