pencil or him who copied that drawing in
threads of silk and wool and gold. Whatever the cause, we can but
rejoice at the result, which, alas, is shown to us by but lamentably
few remnants outside of museums. These very archaic simple pieces are,
for the most part, work of the latter part of the Fourteenth Century
and the first part of the Fifteenth, and as the history of tapestry
shows, were almost invariably woven in France or in Flanders. At the
end of the time mentioned, designs, while retaining much the same
characteristics already described, became more ambitious, more
complicated, and introduced many scenes into one piece. This is easily
proved by a comparison of the illustration of _The Baillee des Roses_,
or _The Sacraments_, with _The Sack of Jerusalem_, all in the
Metropolitan Museum.

The idea in the earliest Gothic cartoons--if the word may be allowed
here, was to make a single picture, a unified group. Into the later
cartoons came the fashion of multiplying these groups on one field, so
that a tapestry had many points of interest, many scenes where
tragedies or comedies were being enacted. Ingenious were the ways of
the early artist to accomplish the separation between the various
scenes, which were sometimes divided merely by their own attitudes, as
folk dispose themselves in groups in a large drawing-room; and
sometimes were divided by natural obstructions, like brooks and trees,
or by columns.

Later yet, all the antique eccentricities passed away, and the laws of
perspective and balance were fully developed in an art which has an
unspeakable charm. All the things that modern art has decreed as crude
or childish has passed away, and the sweet flower of the Gothic
perfection unfolded its exquisite beauty. This Gothic perfection was
the Golden Age of tapestry.

ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL

The use of architecture in the old Gothic designs makes a pleasing
necessity of fastening our attention upon it. In the very oldest
drawing the sole use is to separate one scene from another, in the
same hanging. For this purpose slender columns are used. It is
intensely interesting to note that these are the same variety of
column that meets us on every delightful prowl among old relics of
North Europe, relics of the days when man's highest and holiest energy
expressed itself at last in the cathedral. Those slender stems of the
northern Gothic are verily the stems of plants or of aspiring young
trees, strong when gro