We needs must deal briefly with early French productions in relief and intaglio processes. Woodcut first: some few examples of early playing-cards which have survived destruction to these days, prove the trade of the card-printer to have flourished in France as well as in Germany. Book-printing speedily grew to important proportions; great printing firms were founded in Lyons and elsewhere, and carried on an extensive trade. Men of artistic originality, like Geoffroy Tory, knew how to infuse a distinctive character into type and illustration of their books; but apart from a few choice spirits, artistic France is not conspicuous in these early productions. Not only is printing largely carried on by printers from Germany and Switzerland, but these countries likewise furnish a large share of the relief-blocks needed for illustration. The Holbein “Dance of Death” is a notable instance of this practice. That series of wood-blocks had passed to Lyons, and there one edition after another was printed from the blocks, until they were quite worn out. Woodcut never was, in France, the important means of artistic expression which we have found it to have been in Germany. Its days sped by unheeded. The chief field of usefulness of the woodcut, the decoration and illustration of books and the sphere of the devotional print, were invaded by the intaglio processes. The woodcut lost ground everywhere in the seventeenth century; it had practically no share in solving the problems set to the graphic arts by the rising schools of Dutch, Flemish, and French painters. It sank to mere imitation of the fashionable book-decorations done in etching or engraving. The true, bold language of woodcut, spoken during the sixteenth century, finds no counterpart in the seventeenth; we must, therefore, turn to engraving, to vindicate France as a great center of development in the graphic arts. [Illustration: TOUR DE NESLE Jacques Callot]