Tapestry considered as furniture, both useful and ornamental, might occupy a volume; and those interested in the progress of this beautiful art should study M, Pinchard's long-promised work, or, in English, Jacque-mart, or Mrs. Owen's 'Book of Needlework,' and then compare some of the very early pieces in the South Kensington Museum with the lovely breathing female forms recently to be seen upon the Gobelin looms, which have all the vigour of paintings, all the luminous trans parency of flesh, which Rubens taught the world, and the accurate drawing of strict academic study.

Many persons have a rooted aversion to tapestry because, they say, it harbours dust and insects, and is not as satisfactory in any way as paint or paper. As to the dust and insects, such an objection might apply to curtains, if they were left up long enough; but tapestry does not mean necessarily dirty tapestry, and it appears to me that it is more satisfactory than paint because it has a pictorial design, and than paper because it can be removed and cleaned. There is no background better than old tapestry, because the colours have grown dim enough not be obtrusive. Early tapestry, like early windows, was made in somewhat flat designs with a strongly marked outline; and this purely decorative kind of treatment does not make an apparent breach in the wall by confusing the perspective. Later tapestry, such as that designed by and ' after' Rubens, aimed rather at deceptions, which are far less satisfactory to the eye unless framed as an avowed picture, and when they were new must have been far less beautiful than they are now in faded age.

The fashion has the prestige of antiquity, for the origin of tapestry hangings in the remote Eastern past is unknown; and no one who has used it can deny that it gives great warmth to a room, not only by covering draughty chinks, but by creating a space of warmed air between itself and the wall. This is on the principle of several thin garments being warmer than a single very thick one - even though the latter be thicker than the three combined - because of the intervening layers of warmed air.

Through all the changes which visited our walls up to the production of wall-papers, tapestry lived and improved; the monkish artists first designed for tapestry, among them cruel Dunstan himself. They probably actually wove it. Raphael and his pupils were not above drawing the great cartoons now in the South Kensington Museum, and many sixteenth century and seventeenth century designs - nay, many 300 years earlier, like those matchless feats of the loom at Berne, and the fine pieces at Chartres - were ambitious enough. Battles, processions, hunts, feasts - the subjects had no end, and were perhaps the largest and most important artistic productions till canvas superseded panels for pictures.

There were great tapestry manufactories in Flanders, France, Italy, and England from very early times. Those in France date back to 1025, when a manufactory was working at Poitiers, and in the eleventh century Scandinavian tapestries are spoken of. All these were probably a kind of embroidery like Saracenic tapestry; it was called wah-hrcegel, wall coverings. The Bayeux piece is all we have left of it. Towards the close of the twelfth century Flanders began to use low-warp and high-warp looms, and there may have been English factories as early. Sir Francis Crane owned one at Mortlake, temp. James I., of which Francis de Cleyn was master; some of his paintings resembled Parmegiano's, and Gibson, the dwarf painter, was one of his pupils. Rubens sketched cartoons in Charles I.'s reign for this manufactory; but in Charles I I.'s reign, after Crane's death, it declined, perhaps because leather and velvet were rather less costly. Henri IV. and Louis XIV. greatly encouraged the tapestry works; and pieces are spoken of 120 ells long.

In Florence we see magnificent pieces worked with gold and gems, as pictures designed by the old masters may well be !

Tapestry should be more sedulously collected and preserved than it is. It cost vast sums to make; it decreases by natural accidents every year; yet it is often finer in decay than when the threads were fresh, and possibly a little over-bright, for the true purpose of walls - a background. If dirty, it should be cleaned with care, and in any case mounted properly with the town-mark and the signature visible.

The most beautiful rooms are usually dark in colour, with large windows through which plenteous sunlight streams. For these tapestry is eminently proper. The fashionable Empire rooms with small windows, which the straw-colour walls hardly atone for, would not be suitable.