We cannot guess whether the taste which has sprung up again so suddenly will last. Perhaps its catholicity may prolong its popularity, and something absolutely new in style may be evolved, which shall revive the credit of the “opus Anglicanum.” Of one thing we may be sure—that it is inherent in the nature of Englishwomen to employ their fingers. And the busy as well as the ignorant need a guide to the principles of design, as well as the technical details of the art of embroidery. This should be supplied by the Royal School of Art Needlework, which by inculcating careful drawing, by reviving old traditions and criticizing fresh ideas, becomes a guarantee for the improvement of domestic decorative design.
FINIS.
FOOTNOTES:
[555] “The people of Babylon, the Accadians, had a written literature and a civilization superior to that of the conquering Assyrians, who borrowed their art of writing, and probably their culture, which may have been the centre and starting-point of the western civilization of Asia, and therefore the origin of our own. Accadian civilization was anterior to that of the Phœnicians and the Greeks, and is now received in these later years as the original form, and become again the heritage of mankind. It has been said that Assyrian art was destitute of originality, and to that of the Accadians, which they adopted, we ourselves owe our first customs and ideas. Four thousand years ago these people possessed a culture which in many of its details resembles that of our country and time.”—“Assyrian Life and History,” p. 66, by M. Harkness and Stuart Poole.
[556] “The arts of spinning and the manufacture of linen were introduced into Europe and drifted into Britain in the Neolithic Age. They have been preserved with but little variation from that period down to the present day in certain remote parts of Europe, and have only been superseded in modern times by the complicated machinery so familiar to us.... The spindle and distaff are proved by the perforated spindle-whorls, made of stone, pottery, or bone, commonly met with in Neolithic habitations or tombs. The thread is proved, by discoveries in the Swiss lakes, to have been made of flax; and the combs that have been found for pushing the threads of the warp on the weft show that it was woven into linen on some sort of loom.”—Boyd Dawkins’ “Early Man in Britain,” p. 275.
[557] I am aware that the presence of the Phœnicians (or Carthaginians) on our coasts has been disputed; but I think that the evidence of the Etruscan ornaments I have mentioned gives more than probability to the truth of Pliny’s account of the expedition of Himilco from Gades, 500 B.C. By some he is supposed to have been a contemporary of Hanno, and of the third century B.C. There is some confusion in the imperfect record of the voyage; but it is difficult to interpret it otherwise than that he touched at several points north of Gaul. (See Boyd Dawkins’ “Early Man in Britain,” pp. 457-461; see also Perrot and Chipiez, “L’Histoire de l’Art dans l’Antiquité,” t. iii.; “Phénicie et Cypre,” p. 48.) For a contrary opinion, see Elton’s “Origins of English History.” Elton ascribes the first knowledge of the British islands to the voyage of Pytheas in the fourth century B.C.; he acknowledges that the geography of Britain was well known to the Greeks in the time of Alexander the Great. We owe to Pliny and Strabo the few fragments from Pytheas that have been rescued from oblivion, and to Pliny the notices of Himilco. (See Bouillet’s “Dictionnaire d’Histoire et de Géographie.”)
[558] See Rock’s Introduction to “Textile Fabrics,” p. xii.
[559] I give the following amusing tradition, which was probably founded on the celebrity of the English pearl embroidery of the Anglo-Saxon times, of which much went to Rome:—
“Then Cæsar, like a conqueror, with a great number of prisoners sailed into France, and so to Rome, where after his return out of Brytaine, hee consecrated to Venus a surcote of Brytaine pearles, the desire whereof partly moved him to invade this country.”—(Stow’s “Annales,” p. 14, ed. 1634.) Tacitus, in the Agricola 12, says that British pearls are grey and livid.
[560] See Rock’s Introduction to “Textile Fabrics,” p. xii.