xpect to find work beyond the
rivalry of trade controlled by conditions of time and money. Even then
it would be but the more perfect expression of the same art which in its
degree ennobled things of civic and domestic use.

Church embroidery, as usually practised in these days, is not only the
most frigid and rigid in design, but the hardest and most mechanical in
execution--which last arises in great part from the way it is done. It
is not embroidered straight upon the silk or velvet which forms the
groundwork of the design, but separately on linen. The pattern thus
worked is cut out, and either pasted straight on to the ground-stuff,
or, if the linen is at all loose, first mounted on thin paper and then
cut out and pasted on to the velvet, where it is kept under pressure
until it is dry. In either case the edges have eventually to be worked
over.

This habit of working on linen or canvas and applying the embroidery
ready worked on to the richer stuff, though early used on occasion, does
not seem to have been common until a period when manufacture generally
usurped the place of art. The work in Illustration 87 was done directly
on to the silk. In the latter half of the 18th century there was a
regular trade in embroidery ready to sew on, by which means purveyors
could turn out in a day or two what would have taken months to
embroider.

Even if it had been the invariable mediaeval practice to work sprays or
what not upon canvas and apply them bodily to the velvet, that would not
make it the more workmanlike or straightforward way of working. If
needle stitches are the ostensible means of getting an effect upon a
stuff, it seems only right they should be stitched upon that stuff. To
work the details apart and then clap them on to it, stands to embroidery
very much in the relation of hedge-carpentering to joinery. Nor is it
usually happy in result. Occasionally, as in the case of Miss C. P.
Shrewsbury's vine-leaf pattern (Illustration 88), it disarms criticism.
More often it looks stuck-on. A way of avoiding that look is to add
judicious after-stitching on the stuff itself; and this must not be
confined to the sewing on or outlining merely, but allowed to wander
playfully over the field, so as to draw your eye away from the margin of
the applied patch, and lead you to infer that, some of the needlework
being obviously done on the velvet, all of it is. But to disguise in
this way the line of demarcation, even if you su