the Chancellor of the University
with a pair of perfumed gloves, embroidered with gold and set with
jewels, which cost the University sixty shillings, an immense sum in
those days. Other historic gloves are in the various museums of the
country, seldom or never coming into the open market. In the
Braikenridge Collection sold at Christie's in February of this year I
was able to secure one for L2 12s. 6d., immediately afterwards being
offered double the price for it.

The gloves belonging to Charles I. and Queen Henrietta Maria were very
ornamental, and it is said that even Oliver Cromwell, with all his
austerity, was not proof against the fascination of the decorated glove.

With Charles II. the embroidered gloves seem to have vanished along with
the stumpwork pictures, of which more anon.

Dainty shoes were embroidered in those old times. These, being articles
of wear, like the gloves, are very rare. The same fine petit point work
is seen on them; seed-pearls and in-run gold threads adorn them, and
frequently the Tudor rose, in raised work, forms the shoe knot. Two
pairs in Lady Wolseley's Collection, sold in 1906, fetched six guineas,
and nine and a half guineas. Tiny pocket-books were covered with this
pretty work, and charming covers almost as fresh as when they were
worked are occasionally unearthed, made to hold the old-fashioned
housekeeping and cooking books.

One wonders oftentime how many, and yet, alas! how few, specimens of
this old petit point work have been preserved. It is only during recent
years that the "cult of the antique" has been fashionable, and is also
becoming a source of income and profit to the many who indulge in its
quest. Only members of learned antiquarian societies or born reliquaries
troubled themselves to acquire ancient articles of historic interest
because they were _old_, and served to form the sequence in the fairy
tales of Time. Anything "old" was ruthlessly destroyed, as being either
past wear, shabby, or old-fashioned, and countless treasures, both in
ecclesiastical and secular art, have at all periods been recklessly
destroyed for the sake of their intrinsic value in gold or jewels. In
the early days of my life I was allowed to pick out the corals and
seed-pearls from an old Stuart needle picture "for a doll's necklace!"
the picture itself probably going into the "rag-bag" of the
mid-Victorian good housekeeper.

VI

STUART CASKETS AND MIRRORS

VI

STUART C