enrichments.

Sir Henry Layard has a portrait of the fifteenth century, of the
Sultan Mahomet II., by Gentil Bellini, from which has been copied the
accompanying beautiful embroidered design of a window-hanging.[216]
The grace of the lines, and the delicate taste with which the gems are
set in the work, are a lesson in art (pl. 33).

India sent to Europe more art in gold thread than has ever been
produced amongst us from our own workshops.[217]

The people of Goa, mostly Arabs, embroidered for the Portuguese those
wonderful fabrics, glittering with gold and radiant with colours,
which cover the beds and hang the rooms throughout Portugal and
Spain.[218] The precious metals (often forming the whole grounding)
were employed without stint; the patterns being either embroidered in
coloured silks and gold; or on velvets or satins, with gold alone or
mixed with silver.

The fine gold threads for embroidery, which have preserved their
brilliancy for so many centuries, such as we find worked in
Charlemagne's dalmatic, in Aelfled's maniple, and in the mitres of
Thomas a Becket, are certainly Oriental. To England they came in the
bales of the merchants who brought us our silk, and even our needles,
from India. Later we imported and copied the different ways of giving
effect to inferior metals, and the Spaniard's gilt parchment thread
reached us from their Moorish manufactories.[219]

Designs were sometimes, in the sixteenth century, worked in gold
twisted with coloured silks, sometimes only stitched down with them.
The badges of the Order of the Dragon, instituted by the Emperor
Sigismund, were thus embroidered, and placed on the cloaks of the
knights. The work was so perfect that it resembled jewels of enamelled
gold. Two ancient ones are in the Museum at Munich.

Gold or silver or base metal wire was, in the later Middle Ages and
down to our own times, much employed in the form of what is called
"purl," i.e. coiled wire cut into short lengths, threaded on silk, and
sewn down. German, Italian, and English embroideries were often
enriched with this fabric. Sometimes the wire was twisted with
coloured silks before it was coiled. There are beautiful specimens of
this work of the days of Queen Elizabeth.

Still, throughout Europe the best works were carried out with the best
materials, and these always came from the East. But we sometimes find
that the pressure of circumstances has for a time caused the
employment of adulte