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/540



of the highest families in England, wrought upon a work from English hands, during the fourteenth century. A long hundred years after this elaborate orphrey was worked we find that Dan John Lydgate, monk of Bury St. Edmund's, in his poem called "All stant in chaunge like a mydsomer Rose," upon the fickleness of all earthly things, while singing of this life's fading vanities, counts among them—

"Vowis of pecok, with all ther proude chere."

, ''ed. Halliwell for Percy Society'', p. 25.

To the wild but poetic legend of the swan and his descendants, we have already alluded in our Introduction.

A word or two now upon the needlework, how it was done, and a certain at present unused mechanical appliance to it after it was wrought, so observable upon this vestment, lending its figures more effect, and giving it, as a teaching example of embroidery, much more value than any foreign piece in this numerous collection.

Looking well into this fine specimen of the English needle, we find that, for the human face, all over it, the first stitches were begun in the centre of the cheek, and worked in circular, not straight lines, into which, however, after the middle had been made, they fell, and were so carried on through the rest of the fleshes. After the whole figure had thus been wrought; then with a little thin iron rod ending in a small bulb or smooth knob slightly heated, were pressed down those spots upon the faces worked in circular lines, as well as that deep wide dimple in the throat especially of an aged person. By the hollows thus lastingly sunk, a play of light and shadow is brought out that, at a short distance, lends to the portion so treated a look of being done in low relief. Upon the slightly-clothed person of our Lord this same process is followed in a way that tells remarkably well; and the chest with the upper part of the pelvis in the figure of our Saviour overcoming Thomas's unbelief, shows a noteworthy example of the mediæval knowledge of external anatomy.

We must not, however, hide from ourselves the fact that the edges, though so broad and blunt, given by such a use of the hot iron to parts of an embroidery, expose it somewhat to the danger of being worn out more in those than other portions which soon betray the damage by their thread-bare dingy look, as is the case in the example just cited.

The method for filling in the quatrefoils, as well as working much of the drapery on the figures, is remarkable for being done in a long zigzag diaper-pattern, and after the manner called in ancient inven