Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/131

 this have been king James's? His son, Charles I., used, as it would seem, to send from his prison locks of his own hair to some few of the gentry favourable to his cause, so that the ladies of that house, while working his royal portraiture in coloured silks, might be able to do the head of hair on it, in the very hair itself of that sovereign. One or two of such wrought likenesses of king Charles were, not long ago, shown in the exhibition of miniatures which took place in this Museum.

For verifying passages in early as well as mediæval times, little does the historian think of finding in these specimens such a help for the purpose.

Quintus Curtius tells us, that, reaching India, the Greeks under Alexander found there a famous breed of dogs for lion-hunting more especially. On beholding a wild beast they hush their yelpings, and hold their prey by the teeth with so much stubbornness that sooner than let go their bite they would suffer one of their own limbs to be cut off: "Nobiles ad venandum canes in ea regione sunt: latratu abstinere dicuntur, quum viderunt feram, leonibus maxime, infesti," &c. Such is the animal now known as the cheetah, which, as of old so all through the middle ages, up to the present time, has been trained everywhere in Persia and over India for hunting purposes; and called by our country-*man, Sir John Mandeville, a "papyonn," as we have noticed in this catalogue, p. 178. This far-famed hunting-dog of Quintus Curtius, now known as the cheetah or hunting-lion, may be often met with on silken textiles here from Asiatic looms, especially in Nos. 7083, p. 136; 7086, p. 137; 8233, p. 154; 8288, p. 178.

For a sight of some liturgical appliances which, though once so common and everywhere employed have become rare from having one by one dropped into disuse, ritualists, foreign ones among the rest, will have to come hither. A few more of such articles, though still in common use, are remarkable for the antiquity or the costliness of those stuffs out of which they happento be made.

For its age, and the beauty of its needle-work, the Syon cope is in itself a remarkable treasure, while its emblazoned orphreys, like the