s were
so equally distributed among the Crusaders, that many who the night
before were famishing and imploring relief, suddenly found themselves
overwhelmed with wealth; and Robert de Clair tells us of the wonderful
fetes that followed the capture of Constantinople. The thirteenth
century, as M. Lefebure points out, was conspicuous for an increased
demand in the West for embroidery. Many Crusaders made offerings to
churches of plunder from Palestine; and St. Louis, on his return from the
first Crusade, offered thanks at St. Denis to God for mercies bestowed on
him during his six years' absence and travel, and presented some richly
embroidered stuffs to be used on great occasions as coverings to the
reliquaries containing the relics of holy martyrs. European embroidery,
having thus become possessed of new materials and wonderful methods,
developed on its own intellectual and imitative lines, inclining, as it
went on, to the purely pictorial, and seeking to rival painting, and to
produce landscapes and figure-subjects with elaborate perspective and
subtle aerial effects. A fresh Oriental influence, however, came through
the Dutch and the Portuguese, and the famous _Compagnie des Grandes
Indes_; and M. Lefebure gives an illustration of a door-hanging now in
the Cluny Museum, where we find the French _fleurs-de-lys_ intermixed
with Indian ornament. The hangings of Madame de Maintenon's room at
Fontainebleau, which were embroidered at St. Cyr, represent Chinese
scenery upon a jonquil-yellow ground.

Clothes were sent out ready cut to the East to be embroidered, and many
of the delightful coats of the period of Louis XV. and Louis XVI. owe
their dainty decoration to the needles of Chinese artists. In our own
day the influence of the East is strongly marked. Persia has sent us her
carpets for patterns, and Cashmere her lovely shawls, and India her
dainty muslins finely worked with gold thread palmates, and stitched over
with iridescent beetles' wings. We are beginning now to dye by Oriental
methods, and the silk robes of China and Japan have taught us new wonders
of colour-combination, and new subtleties of delicate design. Whether we
have yet learned to make a wise use of what we have acquired is less
certain. If books produce an effect, this book of M. Lefebure should
certainly make us study with still deeper interest the whole question of
embroidery, and by those who already work with their needles it will be
foun