lour after five hundred years of exposure to their enemies, light
and air. Dye stuffs were precious in those days, and so costly that
even threads of gold and silver (which in general were supplied by the
client ordering the tapestry) hardly exceeded in value certain dyed
wools and silk. All of these workers, from director down to
apprenticed lad, were bound by the guild to do or not do, according to
its infinite code, to the end that the art of tapestry-making be held
to the highest standards. The laws of the guilds make interesting
reading. The guild prevailed all over Europe and regulated all crafts.
In Florence even to-day evidences of its power are on every side, and
the Guildhall in London attests its existence there. Moreover, the
greatest artists belonged to the guilds, uniting themselves usually by
work of the goldsmith, as Benvenuto Cellini so quaintly describes in
his naive autobiography.

GUILDS

It was these same protective laws of the guilds that in the end
crippled the hand of the weaver. The laws grew too many to comply
with, in justice to talent, and talent with clipped wings could no
longer soar. At the most brilliant period of tapestry production
Flanders was to the fore. All Europe was appreciating and demanding
the unequalled products of her ateliers. It was but human to want to
keep the excellence, to build a wall of restrictions around her
especial craft that would prevent rivals, and at the same time to
press the ateliers to execute all the orders that piled in toward the
middle of the Sixteenth Century.

But although the guilds could make wise laws and enforce them, it
could not execute in haste and retain the standard of excellence. And
thus came the gradual decay of the art in Brussels, a decay which
guild-laws had no power to arrest.

GOTHIC PERIOD

The first period in tapestries which interests--except the remnants of
Egyptian and aboriginal work--is that of the Middle Ages, the early
Gothic, because that is when the art became a considerable one in
Europe. It is a time of romance, of chivalry, of deep religious
feeling, and yet seems like the childhood of modernity. Is it the
fault of crudity in pictorial art, or the fault of romances that we
look upon those distant people as more elemental than we, and thus
feel for them the indulgent compassion that a child excites? However
it is, theirs is to us a simple time of primitive emotion and romance,
and the tapestries they have left