on,
shows a spirited naval battle between galleys. A striking peculiarity
of this hanging is that floral designs are scattered in great
profusion among the boats of the combatants.

A patchwork made by the application of bits of leather to velvet was
extensively used in some European countries during the Middle Ages. As
leather did not fray and needed no sewing over at the edge, but only
sewing down, stitching well within the edge gave the effect of a
double outline. This combination of leather and velvet was introduced
from Morocco. A wonderful tent of this leather patchwork, belonging to
the French king, Francois I, was taken by the Spanish at the battle of
Pavia (1525), and is still preserved in the armoury at Madrid.

Some of the very finest specimens of the quilting of the Middle Ages
have been preserved for us in Persia. Here the art, borrowed at a very
early period from the Arabs, was developed in an unusual and typically
oriental manner. Prayer rugs, carpets, and draperies of linen, silk,
and satin were among the products of the Persian quilters.

We are indebted to Mr. Alan S. Cole for the following description of a
seventeenth-century Persian quilted bath carpet, now preserved at the
South Kensington Museum in London. "This typical Persian embroidery is
a linen prayer or bath carpet, the bordering or outer design of which
partly takes the shape of the favourite Persian architectural niche
filled in with such delicate scrolling stem ornament as is so lavishly
used in that monument of sixteenth-century Mohammedan art, the Taj
Mahal at Agra. In the centre of the carpet beneath the niche form is a
thickly blossoming shrub, laid out on a strictly geometric or formal
plan, but nevertheless depicted with a fairly close approach to the
actual appearance of bunches of blossoms and of leaves in nature. But
the regular and corresponding curves of the stems, and the ordered
recurrence of the blossom bunches, give greater importance to
ornamental character than to any intention of giving a picture of a
tree. Similar stems, blossoms, and leaves are still more formally and
ornamentally adapted in the border of the carpet, and to fill in the
space between the border and the niche shape. The embroidery is of
chain stitch with white, yellow, green, and red silks. But before this
embroidery was taken in hand the whole of the linen was minutely
stitched."

Worthy of mention is a patchwork panel made in Resht, Persia, in the