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/561



off in fashionable dress. While bending her steps, Esther looks towards the spot where Ahasuerus is sitting. At this moment an oldish man steps forward, clad after a beseeming fashion: in one hand he holds his red cap, while with the other hand he is stretching out, for Esther's acceptance, his inscribed roll. This person must be Mordecai, thus shown as instructing and encouraging his niece-queen Esther in the hazardous work of saving her people's lives, at the same time that he furnishes her with a copy of the decree for their utter annihilation.

This inner court of the King's house where Esther is now standing over against the hall in which Ahasuerus sits upon his throne is crowded with courtiers, all remarkable for the elegance and costliness of their dress. In a circle of three great personages to the right, one of those high-born dames has brought with her her guitar, made in the form of the calabash, to help on by her music the expected mirth and revelry of the day.

In those several instances in which the royal decree is figured with the imperial seals hanging from it, the impression stamped upon the wax seems, no doubt, to be taken as the cipher of Ahasuerus, a large A, but without the stroke through it.

One remarkable feature among the ornaments of dress assumed by almost all the great personages in this piece of tapestry is the large-linked, heavy golden chain about the neck, worn as much by ladies as by gentlemen. The caps of the men are mostly square.

The elaborately-adorned, closely-fitting, round-shaped caul worn by the women in this court of Ahasuerus is in strict accordance with the female fashion abroad at the beginning of the sixteenth century; while here, in England, the gable-headed coif found more favour than the round with our countrywomen. Then, however, as now, ladies loved long trains to their gowns; and the men's shoes had that peculiar broad toe so conspicuously marked in Hans Holbein's cartoon for a picture of our Henry VIII. belonging to the Duke of Devonshire, and exhibited among the National Portraits on loan to the South Kensington Museum, 1866.

8979.

Tapestry Hanging; subject, the three Fates with a young lady lying dead at their feet. Flemish, early 16th century.

With a grove of blooming trees behind them, and upon a lawn, every