Besides the publications of Sebastian Cramoisy and Chevallier, Leonard Gaultier adorned also those of Nicholas Buon and many other publishers of the time in Paris and Lyons. With such a profusion of works emanating from a single artist, without reckoning those which were produced in great quantity by men of less note, wood engraving was dead. At most it dared to put a wood block of a printer's mark on a title; more ordinarily this mark was not alone sufficient, and showed the disdain in which taste then held wood-cutting. Thus goes fashion, heedless of the most elementary rules of art. To put type within an engraved title, or to ornament a printed text with engravings, is a heresy of principle that was established in the eighteenth century, by the strength of its cleverness and talent. But at the beginning of the seventeenth, in spite of Leonard Gaultier or Thomas de Leu, these overloaded titles, overpowering the opening of the Book, offend the eye by their excessive blackness, and incontestably make us regret the admirable frontispiece on wood of the preceding century. This is all the ornament, properly so called, of the reign of Louis XIII. Leonard Gaultier composed also small vignettes for an edition of Homer, but they are mediocre and unskilful, and it must be said that there were others following the same path. John Picart made a frontispiece with architecture and figures for the _Histoire de la Maison de Châtillon-sur-Marne_ for account of Sebastian Cramoisy. A cold and hard artist he was, the rival of Gaultier, and one of the most employed of the vignette engravers of Paris. There was also Jaspar Isaac, a mediocre craftsman, but who could design clever titles, among them that of the continuation of the _Annales_ of Baronius for the publisher Denis de la Noue. Then Claude Mellan, whose great and clever talent did not disdain second-rate works, in which he gave free play to his burin. It must be said, however, that his bold touch did not well accommodate itself to reduced spaces, and that he was not working in the field necessary to his inventive powers. We mention his portrait of Louis XIV. at the head of the _Code Louis XIV._; the title of the _Perfection du Chrestien_, in which is included a portrait of Cardinal Richelieu, A. Vitré, 1647, folio; that of the _Instruction du Dauphin_ for Cramoisy, 1640; that of the works of St. Bernard for the Royal Printing House; and, perhaps the best of all, the _Poésies_ of Pope Urban VIII., of which we here give a copy. [Illustration: Fig. 71.--Title engraved by Claude Mellan for Urban VIII.'s _Poésies_, printed at the Royal Printing House, in 1642.]