So the artists, feeling no spur in the needs of the moment, fell to imitating the Renaissance artists of Italy. Among them, if we may anticipate the end of our present story, were the Dutch. They, too, had exhausted the immediate impulse of their own environment. War had made them a world-power, and peace brought them the foreign entanglements that maintenance of such a position entailed. They were no longer under the compulsion of an immense centripetal energy, a nation concentrated upon its own self-reliance. They began to spread themselves as cosmopolitans, aping the fashions of the rest of the world; and, as the fashion of the period was to be Italianate, so the artists of Holland, lacking at home the momentum of a common and collective need, ceased to be a school of great original painters, and became instead clumsy imitators of the splendors and elevation of the Italian masters of the Renaissance. After this glance at the nature and cause of decline of Dutch art in the eighteenth century, we may return with a better appreciation of what is ahead of us in our study--the establishment in Holland in the seventeenth century of a new art, the product of a new nation; of a group of original and distinguished painters who formed, as Fromentin says, “the last of the great schools, perhaps the most original, certainly the most local.” The course of our story, therefore, spreads before us. It is to discover in what respect the Dutch School of the seventeenth century was great, how it was original, and in what way its genius grew out of and responded to the common and collective need of the Dutch people of the period. Meanwhile there are the previous fifty years of the sixteenth century to be accounted for, which brings us back to the prologue of the drama, the abdication of Charles V.