“Favour is deceitful And beauty is vain But a woman that feareth the Lord She shall be praised.”—Mary Gardner, aged 9, 1740.

Another undated one of the period is:—

“Awake, arise behold thou Hast thy Life ALIFe ThY Breath ABLASt at night LY Down Prepare to have thy Sleep thy Death thy Bed Thy Grave.”

One with leisure might search out the authors of the doggerel religious and moral verses which adorned samplers. The majority are probably due to the advent of Methodism, for we only find them occurring in any numbers in the years which followed that event. It may be noted that “Divine and Moral Songs for Children,” by Isaac Watts, was first published in 1720, that Wesley’s Hymns appeared in 1736, and Dr Doddridge’s in 1738.

We may here draw attention to the eighteenth-century fashion of setting out the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments ([Fig. 9]), and other lengthy manuscripts from the Old Testament in tablets similar to those painted and hung in the churches of the time. The tablets in the samplers are flanked on either side by full length figures of Christ and Moses, or supported by the chubby winged cherubs of the period which are the common adornments of the Georgian gravestones. In the exhibition at The Fine Art Society’s were specimens dated 1715, 1735, 1740, 1757, and 1762, the Belief taking, in three instances, the place of the Commandments. On occasions the pupil showed her proficiency in modern languages as well as with the needle, by setting out the Lord’s Prayer in French, or even in Hebrew.

Contemporaneously with such lengthy tasks in lettering as the Tables of the Law, came other feats of compassing within the confines of a sampler whole chapters of the Bible, such as the 37th Chapter of Ezekiel, worked by Margaret Knowles in 1738; the 134th Psalm (a favourite one), by Elizabeth Greensmith in 1737, and of later dates the three by members of the Brontë family.

The last-named samplers ([Figs. 10], [11], and [12]) by three sisters of the Brontë family which, through the kindness of their owner, Mr Clement Shorter, I am able to include here, have, it will be seen, little except a personal interest attaching to them. In comparison with those which accompany them they show a strange lack of ornament, and a monotony of colour (they are worked in black silk on rough canvas) which deprive them of all attractiveness in themselves. But when it is remembered who made them, and their surroundings, these appear singularly befitting and characteristic. For, as the dates upon them show, they were produced in the interval which was passed by the sisters at home between leaving one ill-fated school, which caused the deaths of two sisters, and their passing to another. It was a mournful, straitened home in which they lived, one in which it needed the ardent Protestantism that is breathed in the texts broidered on the samplers to uphold them from a despair that can almost be read between the lines. It was also, for one at least of them, a time of ceaseless activity of mind and body, and we can well understand that the child Charlotte, who penned, between the April in which her sampler was completed and the following August, the manuscript of twenty-two volumes, each sixty closely written pages, of a catalogue, did not take long to work the sampler which bears her name. The ages of the three girls when they completed these samplers were: Charlotte, 13; Emily Jane, 11; and Anne, 10.

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