casions when there is no time to stitch, and
it is necessary for some ceremonial and more or less theatric purpose to
paint what had better have been worked. The more frankly such work
acknowledges its temporary and makeshift character the better. Scene
painting is art, until you are asked to take it for landscape painting.
Anyway, the mixture of painting and embroidery is not to be endured; and
it is a poor-spirited embroidress who will thus confess her weakness and
call on painting to help her out. It does not even do that, it fails
absolutely to produce the desired effect. The painting quarrels with
the stitching, and there is after all no semblance of that unity which
is the very essence of picture.

[Illustration: 78. CHINESE CHAIN-STITCHING.]

An instance of painted flesh occurs upon Illustration 91. Can any one,
in view of the bordering to the picture, doubt that the worker had much
better have kept to what she could do, and do perfectly, ornament? An
example, on the other hand, of what may be done in the way of expressing
action in the fewest and simplest chain stitches (if only you know the
form you want to represent and can manage your needle) is given in the
wee figures in the landscape above (78).

[Illustration: 79. FIFTEENTH CENTURY FIGURE WORK.]

In speaking of the necessary treatment of the human figure (as of other
natural form) in needlework, it is not meant to contend that there is
one only way of treating it consistently, or that there are no more
than two or three ways. There are various ways, some no doubt yet to be
devised, but they must be the ways of the needle. The flesh, of course,
is the main difficulty. A Gothic practice, and not the least happy one,
was to show the flesh in the naked linen of the ground, only just
working the outlines of the features in black or brown. Another way was
to work the face in split stitch, as already explained, and over that
the markings of the features, the fine lines in short satin-stitches,
the broader in split-stitch, as shown in the figure of King Abias in
Illustration 87.

The general treatment of the figure there is of course in the manner of
the 14th century, better suited, from its severe simplicity, for
rendering in needlework than later and more pictorial forms of
composition. That needlework can, however, in capable hands, go farther
than that is shown in Illustration 79, a rather threadbare specimen of
15th century work, in which the character