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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: great struggles of the sixteenth century. Salvator Rosa and Callot,
two of the earliest professors of picturesque art, have never been
since surpassed. For indeed, they drew from life. The rags and the
ruins, material, and alas! spiritual, were all around them; the
lands and the creeds alike lay waste. There was ruffianism and
misery among the masses of Europe; unbelief and artificiality among
the upper classes; churches and monasteries defiled, cities sacked,
farmsteads plundered and ruinate, and all the wretchedness which
Callot has immortalised--for a warning to evil rulers--in his
Miseres de la Guerre. The world was all gone wrong: but as for
setting it right again--who could do that? And so men fell into a
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