at the period when this was designed: it is now
a branch of art utilised until all trace of design has gone from it; for
we cannot accept the slight scroll work and contour of a modern silver
knife-handle as a piece of art-workmanship, when we remember the
beautiful objects of the kind produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, gorgeous in design and colour, and occasionally enriched by
jewels or amber.

[Illustration: Fig. 6.]

[Illustration: Fig. 7.]

There is one class of ancient manufacturing art which has been revived
for the use of the modern world with considerable success. We allude to
the Roman works in mosaic, which have furnished designs for our
encaustic tile-manufacturers and our floor-cloth painters. Quaint and
peculiar in its necessary features, it is singularly well adapted for
artisans in both materials. There is also a great variety in the
ornamental details of ancient pavements, at home and abroad; the
geometric forms being at times very peculiar, as in the specimen we give
in the previous page (Fig. 6), which has been selected from one
discovered at Aldborough, in Yorkshire (the _Isurium Brigantum_ of the
Romans), a lonely spot, containing many traces of its ancient
importance, and which has furnished an abundance of relics for the
notice of the antiquary from the days of Camden, who describes it with
that happy brevity that accompanies full knowledge. The pavement we
engrave may be seen in full coloured detail in Mr. Ecroyd Smith's volume
on _Isurium_; the borders placed on each side are portions of other
pavements from the same place, selected as showing the commonest and the
most unusual patterns. The variety and beauty of design and colour in
encaustic tiles adopted by mediaevalists, may be slightly illustrated by
the quaint specimen of foliation copied in Fig. 7. The conjunction of
four such tiles produces great variety in pattern, and excellent
contrasts of colour.

[Illustration: Figs. 8 and 9.]

Geometric form, in all its endless variety, was particularly studied in
the Middle Ages, and decorative enrichments of all kind subjected to its
ruling control. We add two specimens of glass-painting (Figs. 8 and 9),
which are in reality the same design slightly varied in the disposition
of the tints, and the interlacing of the double or strap-lines of one,
while the other has them single only. The striking variety that any
given design may elicit, by a mere rearrangement of this inte