John Donne and George Herbert were engaged in transferring to the new printed page of the seventeenth century many of the effects which had previously been popular in the pictorial world of the later Middle Ages. For them print had made the visual arts recessive and quaint. In this century, while the vogue for metaphysical poetry had come and gone, the sudden predominance of he graphic arts has made print recessive. So a parallel but reverse combination of visual media corresponded for a few years between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.