Through the kindness of my friend, Lord Houghton, I am enabled to give the sequel of the story—Arachne’s transformation into the Spider, as—
A Paraphrase and a Parable.
Lo! how Minerva, recklessly defied,
Struck down the maiden of artistic pride,
Who, all distraught with terror and despair,
Suspended her lithe body in mid-air;
Deeming, if thus she innocently died,
The sacred vengeance would be pacified.
Not so: implacable the goddess cried—
“Live on! hang on! and from this hour begin
Out of thy loathsome self new threads to spin;
No splendid tapestries for royal rooms,
But sordid webs to clothe the caves and tombs.
Nor blame the Poet’s Metamorphoses:
Man’s Life has Transformations hard as these;
Thou shall become, as Ages hand thee down,
The drear day-worker of the crowded town,
Who, envying the rough tiller of the soil,
Plies her monotonous unhealthy toil,
Passing through joyless day to sleepless night
With mind enfeebled and decaying sight,
Till some good genius,[437] kindred though apart,
Resolves to raise thee from the vulgar mart,
And once more links thee to the World of Art.”
[388] Guicciardini ascribes the invention of woven tapestry to Arras, giving no dates; so we do not know whether he attributes it to the Belgic Atrebates or to their successors, the Franks. In either case the craft was probably imported from the East.
[389] The Atrebates were the inhabitants of that Belgic region till the fifth century; now it is the province of Artois, probably a corruption of the name “Atrebates.” Taylor, “Words and Places” (1865), pp. 229-385.
[390] Castel, “Des Tapisseries,” p. 30.
[391] Sidonius Apollinaris, Epist. ix., 13. Cited in Yule’s “Marco Polo,” p. 68.
[392] Castel, “Des Tapisseries,” p. 31.
[393] The commentators of Vasari, MM. Lechanché and Jenron, believe that this art was coeval in the Low Countries with Roman civilization and Christianity; but it would appear that the weavers had fled to Britain to escape from the Romans. Ibid. p. 52. Traces of the name Arras have been found by Bochart and Frahn in Ar-ras, the Arabian name for the river Araxes and the people who inhabit its shores; but this may be accidental, and is at best an uncertain derivation.