tender colours and shadows up to a high
light. But in textile art, which is essentially flat, it is necessary
to pursue a different method, and that of isolation is the most simple
and effective, and was well understood in Egypt, Greece, and India.
The white pattern, or flower, is surrounded with a fine dark line
(black is the best), which effectually separates it from all the
surrounding colours, and gives it the effect of light, even when the
whiteness retains enough of the natural colour of the raw material to
tone it down very perceptibly. The eye accepts it as white, and
ignores the tint that pervades it, and is hardly to be expelled from
silk or wool. Linen and cotton are the whitest of materials, after
passing through the hands of the chemist or the bleacher.

It is amusing to observe that Pliny regarded colours, whether
vegetable or mineral, rather as useful for the pharmacopeia of his
day, than as dyes or artistic pigments. He speaks contemptuously of
the art of his time, and yet he gives some curious hints that are well
worth collecting for experiment. His fragmentary information, though
often inaccurate, is most valuable to those who are seeking once more
to find lasting colours, and despair of discovering mordants that will
fix the aniline tints. From him we learn more of the Egyptian
colouring materials than of any others, as he named their sources,
European, Asiatic, or African; and there is no doubt of the perfection
of their mural pigments and textile dyes, which have remained
unimpaired to the present time.

Renouf says that "painting, as it is now understood, was totally
unknown to the Egyptians; but they understood harmony of colour,[304]
and formulated in it certain principles for decorative uses. They made
the primary colours predominate over the secondary by quantity and
position. They introduced fillets of white or yellow in their
embroideries, as well as in their paintings, between reds and greens,
to isolate them; and they balanced masses of yellow with a due
proportion of black." They never blended their colours, and had no
sense of the harmony of prismatic gradations, or the melting of one
tint into another; each was worked up to a hard and fast edge line. If
in one part of a building, one set of colours predominated, they
placed a greater proportion of other colours elsewhere, within the
range of sight, so as to readjust the balance. Those they employed
were mostly earthy mineral colours (u