Though so small a thing, there is in this collection a little cushion, No. [9047], p. 273, which bears in it much more than what shows itself at first, and is likely to awaken the curiosity of some who may have hereafter to write about the doings of our Court in the early part of the seventeenth century. This cushion is needle-wrought and figured all over with animals, armorial bearings, flowers, and love-knots, together with the letters I and R royally crowned with a strawberry leaf, and the strawberry fruit close by each of those capitals, as well as plentifully sprinkled all over the work.
In Scotland, several noble families, whether they spell their name Fraser or Frazer, use as a canting charge—“arme che cantano”—of the Italians; the French “frasier,” or strawberry, leafed, flowered, fructed proper; the buck too, figured here, comes in or about their armorial shields. Hence then we are fairly warranted in thinking that it was a Fraser’s lady hand which wrought this small, but elaborate cushion, most likely as a gift, and with a strong meaning about it, to our King James I., whose unicorn is not forgotten here; and, in all probability, whilst she also wished to indicate that an S was the first letter in her own baptismal name. Siren too is another term for mermaid—that emblem so conspicuously figured by the lady’s side. All this, with the love-knot so plentifully broadcast and interwoven after many ways, and sprinkled everywhere as such a favourite device, perhaps may help some future biographer of James to throw a light over a few hidden passages in the life of that sovereign.
Human hair, or something very like it, was put into the embroidery on parts of this small cushion. On the under side, to the left, stands a lady with her hair lying in rolls about her forehead. After looking well into them, through a glass, these rolls seem to be real human hair—may be the lady’s own—it is yellow. Peering narrowly into those red roses close by, seeded and barbed, the seeded part or middle is found to be worked with two distinct sorts of human hair—one the very same as the golden hair on the lady’s brow, the other of a light sandy shade: could this have been king James’s? His son, Charles I., used, as it would seem, to send from his prison locks of his own hair to some few of the gentry favourable to his cause, so that the ladies of that house, while working his royal portraiture in coloured silks, might be able to do the head of hair on it, in the very hair itself of that sovereign. One or two of such wrought likenesses of king Charles were, not long ago, shown in the exhibition of miniatures which took place in this Museum.
For verifying passages in early as well as mediæval times, little does the historian think of finding in these specimens such a help for the purpose.
Quintus Curtius tells us, that, reaching India, the Greeks under Alexander found there a famous breed of dogs for lion-hunting more especially. On beholding a wild beast they hush their yelpings, and hold their prey by the teeth with so much stubbornness that sooner than let go their bite they would suffer one of their own limbs to be cut off: “Nobiles ad venandum canes in ea regione sunt: latratu abstinere dicuntur, quum viderunt feram, leonibus maxime, infesti,” &c.[380] Such is the animal now known as the cheetah, which, as of old so all through the middle ages, up to the present time, has been trained everywhere in Persia and over India for hunting purposes; and called by our countryman, Sir John Mandeville, a “papyonn,” as we have noticed in this catalogue, p. [178]. This far-famed hunting-dog of Quintus Curtius, now known as the cheetah or hunting-lion, may be often met with on silken textiles here from Asiatic looms, especially in Nos. [7083], p. 136; [7086], p. 137; [8233], p. 154; [8288], p. 178.
[380] Lib. ix. cap. i. sect. 6.
Section V.—Liturgy.
For a sight of some liturgical appliances which, though once so common and everywhere employed have become rare from having one by one dropped into disuse, ritualists, foreign ones among the rest, will have to come hither. A few more of such articles, though still in common use, are remarkable for the antiquity or the costliness of those stuffs out of which they happen to be made.
For its age, and the beauty of its needlework, the Syon cope is in itself a remarkable treasure, while its emblazoned orphreys, like the vestments on the person of a Percy in Beverley minster, make it, at least according to present custom, singular. Several chasubles here so noteworthy for their gorgeousness, have their fellows equal in splendour, elsewhere; but in this museum are a few articles which till now we might have sought for in vain throughout Christendom in any other private or public collection.