g
high Heaven for deliverance from the top of a feudal pile not half as
high as her stately figure. Laws of proportion are quite lost in this
naive way of telling a story, and one wonders whether the wise old
artist of other times, with his rigid solemnity was heroically
overcoming difficulties of traditional technique, or whether he was
smiling at the infantile taste of his wealthy patrons. The past
fashion in history was to record only the lives and expressions of
those great in power. The artist is ever the servant of such, but may
he not have had his own private thoughts, unpurchaseable, unsold, and
therefore only for our divining. There must have been a sense of
humour then as now, and twinkling eyes with which to see it.

GOTHIC FLOWERS

Always, in studying a Gothic tapestry, we find flowers. The flowers of
nature, they are, a simple nature at that, and never to be thought of
in the same day as the gorgeous, expansive, proud flowers of the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century decoration. Those splendid later
blossoms flaunt their richness with assured swagger and demand of man
his homage, quite forgetting it is the flower's best part to give.

Botticelli had not outgrown the Gothic flowers when he sprinkled them
on the ambient air and floating robe of his chaste and dreamy _Venus_,
nor when he set them about the elastic tripping feet of the _Spring_.
He knew their simple power, and so do we. Scarce a Gothic tapestry is
complete without them, happily for those bent on identification, for
rarely can one discover them without the same thrill that accompanies
the discovery of the first violets and snowdrops in the awakening
woods.

The old weavers set them low in the picture, used them as
space-fillers wherever space lay happily before them, and they never
exaggerated their size, a virtue of which the full Renaissance cannot
boast. They are the simplest sort of flowers, the corolla of petals
turning as frankly toward the observer as the sunflower turns toward
her god, and little bells hanging as regularly as a chime. These are
their characteristics, easily recognisable and expressing the
unsophisticated charm of the creations of honest childish hands.
Irrelevancy is theirs, too. They spring from stones or pavement as
well as from turf or garden, and thus express the more ardently their
love for man and for close association with him. When they are seen
after this manner, it is sure that the early men have set the