and not as furnishing.

Yet I know one instance of a library where a genuine old foliage
tapestry has been cut and fitted to the walls and between bookcases and
doors, where the wood of the room is in mahogany, and a great
chimney-piece of Caen stone of Richardson's designing fills nearly one
side of the room. Of course the tapestry is unapproachable in effect in
this particular place and with its surroundings. It has the richness and
softness of velvet, and the red of the mahogany doors and furniture
finds exactly its foil in the blue greens and soft browns of the web,
while the polished floor and velvety antique rugs bring all the richness
of the walls down to one's feet and to the hearth with its glow of
fire. But this particular room hardly makes an example for general
following. It is really a house of state, a house without children, one
in which public life predominates.

There is a very flagrant far-away imitation of tapestry which is so far
from being good that it is a wonder it has had even a moderate success,
imitation which does not even attempt the decorative effect of the
genuine, but substitutes upon an admirably woven cotton or woollen
canvas, figure panels, copied from modern French masters, and suggestive
of nothing but bad art. Yet these panels are sometimes used (and in fact
are produced for the purpose of being used) precisely as a genuine
tapestry would be, although the very fact of pretence in them, brings a
feeling of untruth, quite at variance with the principles of all good
art. The objection to pictures transferred to tapestries holds good,
even when the tapestries are genuine.

The great cartoons of Raphael, still to be seen in the Kensington
Museum, which were drawn and coloured for Flemish weavers to copy, show
a perfect adaptation to the medium of weaving, while the paintings in
the Vatican by the same great master are entirely inappropriate to
textile reproduction.

A picture cannot be transposed to different substance and purpose
without losing the qualities which make it valuable. The double effort
to be both a tapestry and a picture is futile, and brings into disrepute
a simple art of imitation which might become respectable if its
capabilities were rightly used.

No one familiar with collections of tapestries can fail to recognise the
largeness and simplicity of treatment peculiar to tapestry subjects as
contrasted with the elaboration of pictures.

If we grant that in this mod