ed horizon. The older tapestries give us, with
this, suggestions of human life and action in out-of-door scenes
sufficiently unrealistic to offer a vague dream of existence in fields
and forests. This effectually diverts our minds from the confinements of
space, and allows us the freedom of nature.

Probably the true secret of the never-failing appreciation of
tapestries--from the very beginning of their history until this day--is
this fact of their suggestiveness; since we find that damasks of silk or
velvet or other costly weavings, although far surpassing tapestries in
texture and concentration of colour, yet lacking their suggestiveness to
the mind, can never rival them in the estimation of the world.
Unhappily, we cannot count veritable tapestries as a modern recourse in
wall-treatment, since we are precluded from the use of genuine ones by
their scarcity and cost.

There is undoubtedly a peculiar richness and charm in a tapestry-hung
wall which no other wall covering can give; yet they are not entirely
appropriate to our time. They belong to the period of windy palaces and
enormous enclosures, and are fitted for pageants and ceremonies, and not
to our carefully plastered, wind-tight and narrow rooms. Their mission
to-day is to reproduce for us in museums and collections the life of
yesterday, so full of pomp and almost barbaric lack of domestic comfort.
In studios they are certainly appropriate and suggestive, but in
private houses except of the princely sort, it is far better to make
harmonies with the things of to-day.

Nevertheless if the soul craves tapestries let them be chosen for
intrinsic beauty and perfect preservation, instead of accepting the rags
of the past and trying to create with them a magnificence which must be
incomplete and shabby. Considering, as I do, that tapestries belong to
the life and conditions of the past, where the homeless many toiled for
the pampered few, and not to the homes of to-day where the man of
moderate means expects beauty in his home as confidently as if he were a
world ruler, I find it hardly necessary to include them in the list of
means of modern decoration, and indeed it is not necessary, since a
well-preserved tapestry of a good period, and of a famous manufacturer
or origin, is so costly a purchase that only our bounteous and
self-indulgent millionaires would venture to acquire one solely for
purposes of wall decoration. It would be purchased as a specimen of art