nd the more
enlarged ones are too ornamental.

It is right, first of all, that you should have an idea how this piece
of tapestry is preserved, or rolled up. You see it here, therefore,
precisely as it appears after the person who shows it, takes off the
cloth with which it is usually covered. The first portion of the
needle-work, representing the embassy of Harold from Edward the
Confessor to William Duke of Normandy, is comparatively much
defaced--that is to say, the stitches are worn away, and little more
than the ground, or fine close linen cloth remains. It is not far from
the beginning--and where the color is fresh, and the stitches are,
comparatively, preserved--that you observe the portrait of Harold.

You are to understand that the stitches, if they may be so called,
are threads laid side by side--and bound down at intervals by cross
stitches, or fastenings--upon rather a fine linen cloth; and that the
parts intended to represent flesh are left untouched by the needle.
I obtained a few straggling shreds of the worsted with which it is
worked. The colors are generally a faded or bluish green, crimson, and
pink. About the last five feet of this extraordinary roll are in a
yet more decayed and imperfect state than the first portion. But the
designer of the subject, whoever he was, had an eye throughout to
Roman art--as it appeared in its later stages. The folds of the
draperies, and the proportions of the figures, are executed with this
feeling.

I must observe that, both at top and at bottom of the principal
subject, there is a running allegorical ornament, of which I will not
incur the presumption to suppose myself a successful interpreter.
The constellations, and the symbols of agriculture and of a rural
occupation form the chief subjects of this running ornament. All the
inscriptions are executed in capital letters of about an inch in
length; and upon the whole, whether this extraordinary and invaluable
relic be of the latter end of the eleventh, or the beginning or middle
of the twelfth century seems to me a matter of rather a secondary
consideration. That it is at once unique and important, must be
considered as a position to be neither doubted nor denied.

I have learned even here, of what importance this tapestry roll was
considered in the time of Bonaparte's threatened invasion of our
country: and that, after displaying it at Paris for two or three
months, to awaken the curiosity and excite the love