rly Mediaeval days. It would
appear that nothing new remains to be invented. Copies of past styles,
and selections from the scraps we retain and value as models, are all
that we can boast of now.

Dr. Rock truly says that few persons of the present day have the
faintest idea of the labour, the money, the time, often bestowed of
old upon embroideries which had been designed as well as wrought by
the hands of men and women, each in their own craft the best and
ablest of their day.

Time is too short, our life too densely crowded, to allow leisure for
the extravagance of what is, after all, only a luxury of art--no
longer a civilizer, as of old, but just an efflorescence of our
culture.

Embroidery is now essentially "decoration," and nothing more. It is
intended to appeal to the sense of beauty of the eye, rather than to
the imagination. The designer for needlework should be an artist, but
he need not be a poet. You may omit this art altogether, and you need
be none the less sumptuously clothed and lodged. Yet it is worthy of
careful study as historical evidence, and that in the present and
future, as in the past, it may be an _art_, and not merely a _craft_.

For the great web of history is composed of many threads of divers
colours, and the warp and the woof are often exchanged, yet so
connected and knotted together that the continuity is never broken. On
this web, Time has drawn the picture of the past--sometimes faintly,
sometimes with indelible tints and pronounced forms. By poetry; by
architecture and its decorations; by dress, which represents and
distinguishes nationalities; by customs, such as the different forms
of burial; or even by such details as painting the eyes; also by the
tradition and outcome of the laws of the tribes that flowed
consecutively over Europe from the East; by the institutions which
remained immutably fixed on their native soil, such as those of the
Code of Manu, and those of Babylon, inscribed on bricks or clay; or by
the words, their form and lettering, in which these are handed down to
us;--out of all these the history of man is being reconstructed.

How valuable is every witness to the ancient records, which were
fading into myths in the memories of men. How joyfully is each little
fact hailed as a landmark, in the general fog of doubt!

Now embroidery may boast that it is a source of landmarks for all
time.

Without presuming to fix a date for its first beginning, that which I