As regards the books of the seventeenth century, while "of making many books there was no end," and however interesting for other than artistic reasons, but few would concern our immediate purpose. Woodcuts, headings, initials, tail-pieces, and printers' ornaments continued to be used, but greatly inferior in design and beauty of effect to those of the sixteenth century. The copper-plates introduced are quite apart from the page ornaments, and can hardly be considered decorative, although in the pompous title-pages of books of this period they are frequently formal and architectural enough, and, as a rule, founded more or less upon the ancient arches of triumph of Imperial Rome. Histories and philosophical works, especially towards the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, were embellished with pompous portraits in frames of more or less classical joinery, with shields of arms, the worse for the decorative decline of heraldry, underneath. The specimen given is a good one of its type from a Venetian book of 1562, and gives the earlier form of this kind of treatment. Travels and topographical works increased, until by the middle of the eighteenth century we have them on the scale of Piranesi's scenic views of the architecture of ancient Rome. The love of picturesqueness and natural scenery, or, perhaps, landscape gardening, gradually developing, concentrated interest on qualities the antithesis of constructive and inventive design, and drew the attention more and more away from them, until the painter, pure and simple, took all the artistic honours, and the days of the foundation of academies only confirmed and fixed the idea of art in this restricted sense in the public mind. [Sidenote: HOGARTH.] Hogarth, who availed himself of the copper-plate and publication in book form of his pictures, was yet wholly pictorial in his sympathies, and his instincts were dramatic and satiric rather than decorative. Able painter and designer as he was in his own way, the interest of his work is entirely on that side, and is rather valuable as illustrating the life and manners of his time than as furnishing examples of book illustration, and his work certainly has no decorative aim, although no doubt quite harmonious in an eighteenth century room. [Sidenote: STOTHARD.] Chodowiecki, who did a vast quantity of steel frontispieces and illustrations for books on a small scale, with plenty of character, must also be regarded rather as a maker of pictures for books than as a book decorator. He is sometimes mentioned as kindred in style to Stothard, but Stothard was much more of an idealist, and had, too, a very graceful decorative sense from the classical point of view. His book designs are very numerous, chiefly engraved on steel, and always showing a very graceful sense of line and composition. His designs to Rogers' "Poems," and "Italy," are well-known, and, in their earlier woodcut form, his groups of Amorini are very charming.