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/26

 thence over the Isthmus of Suez, or, perhaps, rather by the overland route, through Persia, to the small but commercial island of Cos (now Koss), lying off the coast of Asia Minor. Pamphile, daughter of Plates, is reported to have first woven it (silk) in Cos. Here, by female hands, were wrought those light thin gauzes which became so fashionable among some high dames, but while so often spoken of by the poets of the Augustan period, were stigmatized by some among them, as well as by the heathen moralists of after ages, as anything but seemly for women's wear. Thus Tibullus says of this sort of clothing:

Illa gerat vestes tenues, quas fœmina Coa Texuit, auratas disposuitque vias.

She may thin garments wear, which female Coan hands Have woven, and in stripes disposed the golden bands.

Years afterwards, thus laments Seneca, the philosopher: "Video sericas vestes, si vestes vocandæ sunt, in quibus nihil est, quo defendi aut corpus aut denique pudor possit." I behold silken garments, if garments they can be called, which are a protection neither for the body nor for shame. And later still, and in the Christian era, an echo to the remarks of Seneca do we hear in the words of Solinus: "Hoc illud est sericum in quo ostentare potius corpora quàm vestire, primò feminis, nunc etiam viris persuasit luxuriæ libido." This is silk, in which at first women but now even men have been led, by their cravings after luxury, to show rather than to clothe their bodies.

While looking over some precious early mediæval MS., often do we yet find that its beautifully limned and richly gilt illuminations, to keep them from harm, or being hurt through the rubbings of the next leaf, have fastened beside them a covering of the thinnest gauze, just as we put in sheets of silver paper for that purpose over engravings. The likelihood is that some at least of these may be shreds from some of those thin translucent textiles which found such favour in the fashionable world for so long a time during the classic period. To some at least of our readers, the curious example of such gauzy interleafings in the manuscript of Theodulph, now at Puy en Velay, will occur.

Not only these transparent silken gauzes wrought in Cos, but far more tasty stuffs, and flowered too, from Chinese looms, found their way to Asia Minor and Italy. In telling of the barbarous nations then called the Seres, Dionysius Periegetes writes that they comb the variously coloured flowers of the desert land to make precious figured garments,