fell of its own weight, and we of to-day value less the
unlimited pains of the elaborate dyer and weaver than we do the
simpler work. The reason is plain. Time fades a little even the
securest dyes, and that little is just enough to reduce to flat
monotones a work in which perhaps sixty thousand tones are set in
subtle shading.

HAUTE LISSE

The worker on tapestries, the modern restorer--to whom be much
honour--finds a sign of identification in the handling of old
tapestries that is scarcely within the province of the amateur, but is
worth mentioning. It is the black tracing on the warp with which
high-warp weavers assist their work of copying the artist's cartoon.
Where this is present, the work is of the prized haute lisse or
high-warp manufacture, instead of the basse lisse or low-warp. But the
latter is not to be spoken of disparagingly, for in the admirable time
of French production about the time of the formation of the Gobelins,
low-warp work was almost as well executed as high-warp, and as much
valued. Brussels made her fame by haute-lisse, but in France the
low-warp was dubbed "_a la facon de Flandres_"; and as Flanders stood
for perfection, the weavers did their best to make the low-warp
production approach in excellence the famed work of the ateliers to
the north, which had formerly so prospered.

To find this black line is to establish the fact that the tapestry was
woven on a high-warp loom, if nothing more. But that in itself means,
as is explained in the chapter on looms and _modus operandi_, that a
superior sort of weaver, an artist-artisan, did the work, and that he
had enormous difficulties to overcome in his patient task.

A black outline woven in the fabric is one which artists prior to the
Seventeenth Century used to give greater strength to figures. It was
the habit thus to trace the entire human form, to lift it clearly from
its background, after the "poster" manner of to-day. It is as though a
dark pencil had outlined each figure. This practice stopped in later
years, and is not seen at all in the softer methods of the Gobelins.

THE WEAVE

The materials of tapestries we know to be invariably wool, silk and
metal threads, yet the weaving of these varies with the talent of the
craftsman. The manner of the oldest weavers was to produce a fabric
not too thick, flexible rather--for was it not meant to hang in
folds?--and of an engagingly even surface. It was not too fine, yet
had none of