The newspapers crowd with losses of lace, and rarer—finds.[[993]]
They give us, however, no clue to the home manufacture. "A pasteboard box full of laced linen, and a little portmanteau with some white and grey Bone lace,"[[994]] would seem to signify a lace much made two hundred years ago, of which we have ourselves seen specimens from Dalecarlia, a sort of guipure, upon which the pattern is formed by the introduction of an unbleached thread, which comes out in full relief—a fancy more curious than pretty.
The petticoats of the ladies of King Charles's court have received due honour at the hands of Pepys, whose prying eyes seem to have been everywhere. On May 21 of the same year he so complacently admired himself in his new lace band, he writes down: "My wife and I to my Lord's lodging; where she and I staid walking in White Hall Gardens. And in the Privy Garden saw the finest smocks and linnen petticoats of my Lady Castlemaine's, laced with rich lace at the bottom, that ever I saw; and it did me good to look at them."
Speaking of the ladies' attire of this age, Evelyn says:—
"Another quilted white and red,
With a broad Flanders lace below;
Four pairs of bas de soye shot through
With silver; diamond buckles too,
For garters, and as rich for shoe.
Twice twelve day smocks of Holland fine,