e, France, and Belgium are all of linen, i.e.
flaxen thread. Clearness and strength in these delicate fabrics cannot
be obtained with cotton, which, especially when it is washed, swells
and fluffs, and never has the radiant appearance and purity of flax.

Embroidery is always a natural accompaniment of fine linen. Those that
are still preserved to us from early and Middle-Age times are nearly
all on linen, if not on silk. The woollen fragments are very few and
imperfect. They have been invariably "fretted" by the moth.

White needle embroidery is mostly worked in linen-thread, though
cotton-thread has been used a great deal, and is very fit for the
purpose.

4. COTTON.

Cotton was native to India,[181] as flax was to Egypt. It not only was
grown, woven, and printed there from the remotest antiquity, but was
cultivated nowhere else. The Egyptians do not appear to have grown it
till the fourteenth century A.D., though they had long imported it as
raw material, and as plain and printed webs.[182] It was called
tree-wool.

It was first woven in Italy in the thirteenth century, and used for
making paper; and in the sixteenth, the plant was grown in the south
of Europe. From Italy it was carried into the Low Countries, and only
reached England in the seventeenth century,[183] so lately has the
great staple of our manufactures first belonged to us.

The fibre of cotton has neither the strength nor the durability of
flax or silk, but it is the third in the group of the most universally
qualified materials for all purposes of domestic textile art, ranging
from carpets and sails, to fine chintzes for dress, and filmy muslins.
The cloudy effect of these delicate fabrics is their own peculiar
beauty. Muslins for hangings, printed or embroidered, have always
been a luxury from India; they were called "carbasa," and were much
esteemed in Rome as a protection against the sun.[184]

But we have much earlier notice of them, as being the curtains
described in the Book of Esther, hung with silver rings to the pillars
of marble in the banqueting hall at Susa or Shushan: "blue and white
muslin" (i.e. carpas,[185] mistranslated "green" in the Authorized
Version), "fastened with cords of fine linen and purple."

The word "carbasina" occurs in a play by Statius, evidently translated
from a writer of the new Greek comedy period. It may be inferred,
therefore, that the Greeks used cotton 200 B.C.[186] A century before,
Nearchus (one