Seven Centuries of Lace

Transcriber's Notes:
Inconsistencies in spelling (for example fogliami vs. foliami ) have generally been preserved as originally printed. All corrections made to the text are listed at the end of this ebook.
BY
MRS. JOHN HUNGERFORD POLLEN WITH A PREFACE BY ALAN COLE, C.B. AND 120 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN MCMVIII
Printed in England
Dear Mrs. Pollen,—Having examined the admirable photographs to your lace collection, and the letterpress which you have written to accompany them, with a view to meet your wish that I should make revisions and suchlike where I thought necessary, please allow me in the first place to thank you for having entrusted me with what has been a very congenial work, and to say that I really have but few suggestions to offer. Such as they are, they amount to little more than amplifying, and slightly modifying here and there, what you have written.
Your glossary of terms used in describing lace and cognate work is very full, and contains several Italian terms which strike me as being unquestionably of technical value in supplementing information put forward in the best English works on lace-making.
Upon the introductory part of your attractive letterpress you also asked me to freely express an opinion, giving it such a shape as to make it suitable for use as a preface to your work. I now do this with considerable diffidence, notwithstanding that during a good many years I have had a large number of specimens of lace before me, including probably some of the finest ever made. You had the initial advantage of inheriting lace of incontestable origin and antiquity, and also of finding specimens in different countries where facts and traditions of their manufacture could be ascertained on the spot.
For so long a period as that from, say, the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, men derived as much satisfaction in acquiring and wearing laces as women then did. But autres temps, autres mœurs , and closely as our sex may at one time have run yours in the appreciation of lace, yours has outstripped and beaten ours. This, of course, is as it should be, for skill in all forms of needlework and dainty thread-work has practically been the monopoly of women from the time of Penelope forwards, notwithstanding the strict observance of the rule laid down by St. Benedict that the members of his Order should be expert in the use of both pen and needle (as they were for centuries); or the records of the seventeenth century, that boys attended lace-making schools in Devonshire, and that English tailors and labouring men often made good saleable lace in their leisure time during the eighteenth century.