Antoine Vitré, in spite of his misfortunes, was a great personage. He was painted by Champagne and engraved by Morin, as was Richelieu himself. The portrait was reproduced in the book of M. Delaborde, _La Gravure_ (p. 189). Such was the man whom we meet at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV. as syndic of booksellers; and it was by no means a sinecure, a canonry giving honour and profit, quite the other way. With the Draconian rules on the subject, the syndic assumed a heavy burden towards the King, as well as towards his kinsmen. Religious quarrels envenomed questions, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was to have for its immediate corollary new and more severe royal ordinances. The reign of Louis XIV. saw the zenith of engraving with the burin, but not that of printing or illustration. Doubtless it would be puerile to pretend that typography had not made any material progress; it had done so in engraving and in composition; work was done more quickly, because the presses had been made more perfect. But the wise harmony of the old printers, their sure taste, even in their old irregular blocks, was no longer there to form a graceful and charming whole, which is to modern precision as a picture by Van Eyck is to a chromo-lithograph. Under Louis XIV., titles became regular, following, as we have said above, and modelling themselves on, the affected and peruked people who read them. All art entered on this path of sublimity and grandeur. The painter Le Brun is the highest exponent of this false Olympus, where an heroic pose became necessary for the most humble movements. Made popular by engraving by Pesne, Audran, Poilly, Edelinck, and a hundred others, this tendency overran everything: art and industry, painting and tapestry, illustration and typography itself. All was grand, in reverse of other times, when all was small and mean. The embellishments of the Book were full of gods in perukes and goddesses in armour, Louis XIV. as Apollo, as the sun illuminating the world. "Nec pluribus impar" was not the device of one man; it was the mighty and glorious cry of a whole people, from great to small, from the sublime painter to the modest printer. Ordinarily these exaggerations are not useful to the arts. Here they were. But, for the matter that specially occupies us, it does not appear that the Book was much advanced. It approached a marvellous epoch of a delicate and graceful art; but it did not find its form; it dragged painfully after the Plantinian works, heavily throwing its etchings and burins in the middle of texts, gross and in bad taste. Yet taste in literature had an onward tendency; Molière and La Fontaine produced on their contemporaries the effect that in our day the naturalists have produced on the romanticists; but this was not for long. Majesty recovered its rights with Bossuet, Boileau, and the others. [Illustration: Fig. 77.--Tailpiece of Sébastien Leclerc for the _Promenade de St. Germain_.]