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/143

 the prince who was to wear them or give them away, or some short form of prayer or benediction. By Christian eyes, such Arabic words were looked upon as the true unerring sign that the stuffs that showed them came from Saracenic looms—the best of those times—or, in other terms, were the trade-mark of the Moslem. The Christian and Jewish weavers in many parts of the East, to make their own webs pass as Saracenic goods, wrought the Paynim trade-mark, as then understood, upon them. The forgery is clumsy: the letters are poor imitations of the Arabic character, and the pretended word runs, as it should, first correctly, or from right to left, then wrong or backward from left to right, just as if this part of the pattern—and it is nothing more—had been intended, like every other element in it, to confront itself by immediate repetition on the self-same line. Our young folks who sometimes amuse themselves by writing a name on paper, and while the ink is wet fold the sheet so that the word is shown again as if written backwards, get such a kind of scroll.

In many Oriental silk textiles the warp is either of hemp, flax, or cotton; but this is so easily discoverable that it could hardly have been done for fraud' sake. There is however a Saracenic trick, learned from that people, and afterwards practised by the Spaniards of the South, for imitating a woof of gold. It is rather ingenious, and we presume unknown among collectors and writers until now.

For the purpose, the finer sort of parchment was sought out, sometimes as thin as that now rare kind of vellum called, among manuscript collectors, "uterine." Such skins were well gilt and then cut into very narrow shreds, which were afterwards, instead of gold, woven, as the woof to the silken warp, to show those portions of the pattern which should be wrought in golden thread. But as these strips of gilded parchment were flat, they necessarily gave the stuffs in which they came all the look of being that costly and much used web called by us in the fifteenth century "tyssewys," as we have before noticed, p. xxxi. Specimens of such a fraudulent textile are to be seen here, Nos. 7067, p. 132; 7095, p. 140; 8590, p. 224; 8601, p. 229; 8639, p. 243, &c.

—SYMBOLISM.

A metaphor or figurative speech is the utterance to the understanding through the ear of words which have other and further meanings in them than their first one. Symbolism is the bringing to our thoughts, through the eye, some natural object, some human personage, some art-wrought figure,