The lavish use of such materials were enough to overweight even vigorous designers like Virgil Solis, who though able, facile, and versatile as he was, seems but a poor substitute for Holbein. [Illustration: FRENCH SCHOOL. XVITH CENTURY. DESIGNED BY ORONCE FINÉ. (PARIS, SIMON DE COLINES, 1534.) (_Comp. Dürer's title to Plutarch, 1513, and St. Ambrosius, 1520._)] [Sidenote: THE RENAISSANCE.] What was at first an inspiriting, imaginative, and refining influence in art became finally a destructive force. The youthful spirit of the early Renaissance became clouded and oppressed, and finally crushed with a weight of pompous pedantry and affectation. The natural development of a living style in art became arrested, and authority, and an endeavour to imitate the antique, took its place. The introduction of the copper-plate marked a new epoch in book illustration, and wood-engraving declined with its increased adoption, which, in the form it took, as applied to books, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was certainly to the detriment and final extinction of the decorative side. [Sidenote: COPPER-PLATE.] It has already been pointed out how a copper-plate, requiring a different process of printing, and exhibiting as a necessary consequence such different qualities of line and effect, cannot harmonize with type and the conditions of the surface-printed page, since it is not in any mechanical relation with them. This mechanical relation is really the key to all good and therefore organic design; and therefore it is that design was in sounder condition when mechanical conditions and relations were simpler. A new invention often has a dislocating effect upon design. A new element is introduced, valued for some particular facility or effect, and it is often adopted without considering how--like a new element in a chemical combination--it alters the relations all round. Copper-plate engraving was presumably adopted as a method for book-illustration for its greater fineness and precision of line, and its greater command of complexity in detail and chiaroscuro, for its purely pictorial qualities, in short, and its adoption corresponded to the period of the ascendancy of the painter above other kind of artists. [Illustration: GERMAN SCHOOL. LATE XVITH CENTURY. VIRGIL SOLIS, BIBLE. (FRANKFORT, SIGM. FEYRABEND, 1563.)] [Illustration: VENETIAN SCHOOL. LATE XVITH CENTURY. ARTIST UNKNOWN. (VENICE, G. GIOLITO, 1562.)]