The material of the back is rich green velvet, but it is thickly
covered with embroidery: there has not indeed, originally, been space
to lay a fourpenny-piece. It is entirely covered with animals and
flowers, in green, crimson, lilac, and yellow silk, and gold thread.
Round the edge is a border about an inch broad, of gold thread.

Of the date of 1624 is a book of magnificent penmanship, by the hand
of a female, of emblems and inscriptions. It is bound in crimson silk,
having in the centre a Prince's Feather worked in gold-thread, with
the feathers bound together with large pearls, and round it a wreath
of leaves and flowers. Round the edge there is a broader wreath, with
corner sprigs all in gold thread, thickly interspersed with spangles
and gold leaves.

All these books, with the exception of the one quoted from Ballard's
Memoirs, were most obligingly sought out and brought to me by the
gentlemen at the British Museum. Probably there are more; but as,
unfortunately for my purpose, the books there are catalogued according
to their authors, their contents, or their intrinsic value, instead of
their outward seeming, it is not easy, amidst three or four hundred
thousand volumes, to pick out each insignificant book which may happen
to be--

"In velvet bound and broider'd o'er."

FOOTNOTES:

[126] Southey.

[127] We have seen cartouche-boxes embroidered precisely in the same
style, and probably therefore of the same period as some of the
embroidered books here referred to.

[128] Ballard's Memoirs.

CHAPTER XXIV.

NEEDLEWORK OF ROYAL LADIES.

"Thus is a Needle prov'd an Instrument
Of profit, pleasure, and of ornament,
Which mighty Queenes have grac'd in hand to take."

John Taylor.

Needlework is an art so attractive in itself; it is capable of such
infinite variety, and is such a beguiler of lonely, as of social
hours, and offers such scope to the indulgence of fancy, and the
display of taste; it is withal--in its lighter branches--accompanied
with so little bodily exertion, not deranging the most _recherche_
dress, nor incommoding the most elaborate and exquisite costume, that
we cannot wonder that it has been practised with ardour even by those
the farthest removed from any necessity for its exercise. Therefore
has it been from the earliest ages a favourite employment of the high
and nobly born.

The father of song hardly refers at all to the noble da