Indes;
and M. Lefebure gives an illustration of a door-hanging now in the Cluny
Museum, where we find the French fleurs-de-lys intermixed with Indian
ornament. The hangings of Madame de Maintenon's room at Fontainebleau,
which were embroidered at St. Cyr, represent Chinese scenery upon a
jonquil-yellow ground.

Clothes were sent out ready cut to the East to be embroidered, and many
of the delightful coats of the period of Louis XV. and Louis XVI. owe
their dainty decoration to the needles of Chinese artists. In our own
day the influence of the East is strongly marked. Persia has sent us her
carpets for patterns, and Cashmere her lovely shawls, and India her
dainty muslins finely worked with gold thread palmates, and stitched over
with iridescent beetles' wings. We are beginning now to dye by Oriental
methods, and the silk robes of China and Japan have taught us new wonders
of colour-combination, and new subtleties of delicate design. Whether we
have yet learned to make a wise use of what we have acquired is less
certain. If books produce an effect, this book of M. Lefebure should
certainly make us study with still deeper interest the whole question of
embroidery, and by those who already work with their needles it will be
found full of most fertile suggestion and most admirable advice.

Even to read of the marvellous works of embroidery that were fashioned in
bygone ages is pleasant. Time has kept a few fragments of Greek
embroidery of the fourth century B.C. for us. One is figured in M.
Lefebure's book--a chain-stitch embroidery of yellow flax upon a mulberry-
coloured worsted material, with graceful spirals and palmetto-patterns:
and another, a tapestried cloth powdered with ducks, was reproduced in
the Woman's World some months ago for an article by Mr. Alan Cole. {334a}
Now and then we find in the tomb of some dead Egyptian a piece of
delicate work. In the treasury at Ratisbon is preserved a specimen of
Byzantine embroidery on which the Emperor Constantine is depicted riding
on a white palfrey, and receiving homage from the East and West. Metz
has a red silk cope wrought with great eagles, the gift of Charlemagne,
and Bayeux the needle-wrought epic of Queen Matilda. But where is the
great crocus-coloured robe, wrought for Athena, on which the gods fought
against the giants? Where is the huge velarium that Nero stretched
across the Colosseum at Rome, on which was represented the starry sky,
and Apollo dr