rtist's
historians have made him address this impetuous reply to the king
himself, but M. Meaume reminds us that, familiar with courts, he knew
too well the civility due to a sovereign to make it probable that he so
forgot his dignity. Later the king tried to allure Callot by gifts,
honors and pensions, but in vain. The sturdy gentleman preferred his
oppressed prince to the royal favor, and set himself to immortalizing
the misfortunes of his country in the superb series of etchings which he
called "_Les Miseres de la Guerre_." He made six little plates showing
in the life of the soldier the misery he both endures and inflicts upon
others. These were the first free inspiration of the incomparable later
set called "_Les Grandes Miseres_," "a veritable poem," M. Meaume
declares, "a funeral ode describing and deploring the sorrows of
Lorraine." These sorrows so much afflicted him that he would gladly
have gone back to Italy to spend the last years of his life, had not the
condition of his health, brought on by his indefatigable labor,
prevented him.

He lived simply in the little town where he had seen his young visions
of the spirit of art, walking in the early morning with his elder
brother, attending mass, working until dinner time, visiting in the
early afternoon with the persons, many of them distinguished and even of
royal blood, who thronged his studio, then working until evening. He
rarely attended the court, but grew constantly more quiet in taste and
more severe in his artistic method, until the feeling for the grotesque
that inspired his earlier years were hardly to be discerned. Once only,
in the tremendous plate illustrating the Temptation of Saint Anthony,
did he return to his old bizarre vision of a world conceived in the mood
of Dante and Ariosto.

Callot died on the 24th of March, 1635, at the age of forty-three. Still
a young man, he had passed through all the phases of temperament that
commonly mark the transit from youth to age. And he had used his art in
the manner of a master to express the external world and his convictions
concerning the great spiritual and ethical questions of his age. He
enunciated his message distinctly; there were no tender gradations, no
uncertainties of outline or mysteries of surface in his work. It is the
grave utterance of the definite French intelligence with a note of
deeper suggestion brought from those regions of ironic gloom in which
the Florentine recorded his sublim