es, he said, were to the North of Europe what fresco was to the
South--our climate, amongst other reasons, guiding us in our choice of
material for wall-covering. England, France, and Flanders were the three
great tapestry countries--Flanders with its great wool trade being the
first in splendid colours and superb Gothic design. The keynote of
tapestry, the secret of its loveliness, was, he told the audience, the
complete filling up of every corner and square inch of surface with
lovely and fanciful and suggestive design. Hence the wonder of those
great Gothic tapestries where the forest trees rise in different places,
one over the other, each leaf perfect in its shape and colour and
decorative value, while in simple raiment of beautiful design knights and
ladies wandered in rich flower gardens, and rode with hawk on wrist
through long green arcades, and sat listening to lute and viol in blossom-
starred bowers or by cool gracious water springs. Upon the other hand,
when the Gothic feeling died away, and Boucher and others began to
design, they gave us wide expanses of waste sky, elaborate perspective,
posing nymphs and shallow artificial treatment. Indeed, Boucher met with
scant mercy at Mr. Morris's vigorous hands and was roundly abused, and
modern Gobelins, with M. Bougereau's cartoons, fared no better.

Mr. Morris told some delightful stories about old tapestry work from the
days when in the Egyptian tombs the dead were laid wrapped in picture
cloths, some of which are now in the South Kensington Museum, to the time
of the great Turk Bajazet who, having captured some Christian knights,
would accept nothing for their ransom but the 'storied tapestries of
France' and gerfalcons. As regards the use of tapestry in modern days,
he pointed out that we were richer than the middle ages, and so should be
better able to afford this form of lovely wall-covering, which for
artistic tone is absolutely without rival. He said that the very
limitation of material and form forced the imaginative designer into
giving us something really beautiful and decorative. 'What is the use of
setting an artist in a twelve-acre field and telling him to design a
house? Give him a limited space and he is forced by its limitation to
concentrate, and to fill with pure loveliness the narrow surface at his
disposal.' The worker also gives to the original design a very perfect
richness of detail, and the threads with their varying colours and