voted to the history of lace,
and though some may not find it quite as interesting as the earlier
portion it will more than repay perusal; and those who still work in this
delicate and fanciful art will find many valuable suggestions in it, as
well as a large number of exceedingly beautiful designs. Compared to
embroidery, lace seems comparatively modern. M. Lefebure and Mr. Alan
Cole tell us that there is no reliable or documentary evidence to prove
the existence of lace before the fifteenth century. Of course in the
East, light tissues, such as gauzes, muslins, and nets, were made at very
early times, and were used as veils and scarfs after the manner of
subsequent laces, and women enriched them with some sort of embroidery,
or varied the openness of them by here and there drawing out threads. The
threads of fringes seem also to have been plaited and knotted together,
and the borders of one of the many fashions of Roman toga were of open
reticulated weaving. The Egyptian Museum at the Louvre has a curious
network embellished with glass beads; and the monk Reginald, who took
part in opening the tomb of St. Cuthbert at Durham in the twelfth
century, writes that the Saint's shroud had a fringe of linen threads an
inch long, surmounted by a border, 'worked upon the threads,' with
representations of birds and pairs of beasts, there being between each
such pair a branching tree, a survival of the palm of Zoroaster, to which
I have before alluded. Our authors, however, do not in these examples
recognise lace, the production of which involves more refined and
artistic methods, and postulates a combination of skill and varied
execution carried to a higher degree of perfection. Lace, as we know it,
seems to have had its origin in the habit of embroidering linen. White
embroidery on linen has, M. Lefebure remarks, a cold and monotonous
aspect; that with coloured threads is brighter and gayer in effect, but
is apt to fade in frequent washing; but white embroidery relieved by open
spaces in, or shapes cut from, the linen ground, is possessed of an
entirely new charm; and from a sense of this the birth may be traced of
an art in the result of which happy contrasts are effected between
ornamental details of close texture and others of open-work.

Soon, also, was suggested the idea that, instead of laboriously
withdrawing threads from stout linen, it would be more convenient to
introduce a needle-made pattern into an open netw