uped, dainty when alone, and forming a refined
division for the various scenes in a picture. It must be confessed
that in the medium of aged wool they sometimes totter with the effect
of imminent fall, but that they do not fall, only inspires the
illusion that they belong to the marvellous age of fairy-tale and
fancy.

The careful observer takes a keen look at these columns as a clue to
dates. The shape of the shaft, whether round or hectagonal, the
ornament on the capitals, are indications. It is not easy to know how
long after a design is adopted its use continues, but it is entirely a
simple matter to know that a tapestry bearing a capital designed in
1500 could not have been made prior to that time.

The columns, later on, took on a different character. They lifted
slender shafts more ornamented. It is as though the restless men of
Europe had come up from the South and had brought with them
reminiscences of those tender models which shadowed the art of the
Saracens, the art which flavoured so much the art of Southern Europe.
The columns of many a cloister in Italy bear just such lines of
ornament, including the time when the brothers Cosmati were
illuminating the pattern with their rich mosaic.

Then, later still, the columns burst into the exquisite bloom of the
early Renaissance, their character profoundly different, but their use
the same, that of dividing scenes from one another on the same woven
picture. But as any allusion to the Renaissance seems to thrust us far
out onto a radiant plain, let us scamper back into the mysterious wood
of the Gothic and pick up a few more of its indicative pebbles, even
as did Hans and Gretel of fairyland.

A use of Gothic architectural detail gives a religious look to
tapestry, quite other than the later introduction of castles. These
castle strongholds of the Middle Ages wasted no daintiness of
construction, nor favoured light ornament, nor dainty hand. They were,
par excellence, places of defence against the frequent enemy; so, in
bastion and tower they were piled in curving masses around the scenes
of the later Gothic tapestries. Even more, they began to play an
important part in the _mise en scene_, and were drawn on tiny scale as
habitations of the actors in the play who thrust heads from windows no
larger than their throats, or who gathered in gigantic groups on
disproportioned tessellated roofs.

Occasionally a lovely lady in distress is seen in fine raiment prayin