ame in
large hangings was a suppressing of the delicate subjects that delight
the imagination by their playful grace, their association of human
life with all that is gaily exquisite. The mode was for leaving the
land of idealised mythology, for discarding the flowers, the scrolls,
the happy loves and charming crew that lived among them, and for
plunging into Roman history, real and ugly, enwrapped in drapings too
full, cumbered with forced accessory, or into such mythology as is
represented in _Cupid and Psyche_. (Plate facing page 132.)

The _History of Esther_ illustrates the loss of imagination sustained
by the border which had come to be a mere woven imitation, in shades
of brown and yellow, of a carved and gilded, wooden frame. At the
close of the reign of Louis XV, borders were frankly abandoned
altogether. Compare this state of things with the days when Audran and
Coypel were producing the sets of _The Seasons_, _The Months_, and
_Don Quixote_. It is aridness compared to talented invention.

[Illustration: CUPID AND PSYCHE

Gobelins Tapestry. Eighteenth Century. Design by Coypel]

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF CATHERINE OF RUSSIA

Gobelins under Louis XVI.]

The top note of the imitation of painting was struck when the Gobelins
set the task of becoming a portrait maker. (Plate facing page 133.)
The work was done, it was bound to be, as royalty backed the demand.
Portraits were woven of Louis XV (to be seen now at Versailles), and
his queen, of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and others less well
known. A better scheme for limiting the talent of the weaver could not
have been suggested by his most ingenious enemy. He was a man of
talent or his art had not reached so high, and as such must be
untrammelled; but here was given him a work where personal discretion
was not allowed, where he must copy tone for tone, shade by shade, the
myriad indefinite blendings of the brush.

It is this practice, pursued to its end, that has made of the tapestry
weaver a mere part of a machine, and tapestry-making a lost art, to
remain in obscurity until weavers return to the time before the French
decadence.

The temper of those who hold in their hands the direction of the
people, these are the determining causes of the products of that age.
If d'Angivillier was responsible for displacing a transcendent art
with a false one, if he routed a dainty mythology and its accessories
with the heavy effort and paraphernali