From the point of view of engraving alone, the prints published in France at this time are for the most part models of spirit and delicacy, as those of the Louis XIV. masters are of learned execution and vigorous conception. Moreover, under the frivolous forms affected by French engraving in the eighteenth century, something not unfrequently survives of the masterly skill and science of the older men. It is to be supposed that Laurent Cars remembered the example of Gérard Audran, and, in his own way, succeeded in perpetuating it when he engraved Lemoyne's "Hercule et Omphale," and "Délivrance d'Andromède." Even when he was reproducing such fantasies as the "Fête vénitienne" of Watteau, or scenes of plain family life, like Chardin's "Amusements de la Vie privée," and "La Serinette," he had the art of supplementing from his own taste whatever strength and dignity his originals might lack. Was it not, too, by appropriating the doctrine, or at least the method, of Audran--his free alliance of the burin with the needle--that Nicolas de Larmessin, Lebas, Lépicié, Aveline, Duflos, Dupuis, and others, produced their charming transcripts of Pater, Lancret, Boucher himself--in spite of his impertinences of manner and his unpleasant falseness of colour--and, above all, Watteau, of all the masters of the eighteenth century the best understood and the most brilliantly interpretated by the engravers? A while later, Greuze had the honour to occupy them most; and some among them, as Levasseur and Flipart, did not fail to acquit themselves with ability of a task rendered peculiarly difficult by the flaccid and laboured execution of the originals. [Illustration: FIG. 89.--CHEDEL. "Arlequin Jaloux." After Watteau.] However summary our description of the progress of French engraving during the whole of the reign of Louis XV., or the early years of Louis XVI., it is scarcely possible not to mention, side by side with historical and genre engraving, the countless illustrations--of novels, fables, songs, and publications of every description--the general aspect of which so strongly bears witness to the fertility and grace of French art at that time. It is difficult to omit the names of those agreeable engravers of dainty subjects, not seldom of their own design: those _poetæ minores_, the vaudevillists of the burin, who, from the interpreters of Gravelot, Eisen, and Gabriel de St. Aubin to Choffard, from Cochin to Moreau, have left us so much work steeped in the richest, the most varied imagination, or informed by an exquisite natural perception. Ready and ingenious above all others, delicate even in their most capricious flights, witty before everything, they are artists whose accomplishment, in spite of its appearance of frivolity, is not to be matched for delicacy and science in the work of any other epoch, or the school of any other country. [Illustration: FIG. 90.--COCHIN. "La Main Chaude." After De Troy.]