the looseness associated with the coarse, hurried work of
later and degenerate times. It was more like the even fabric we
associate with machine work, yet as unlike that as palpitating flesh
is like a graven image. It was the logical production of honest
workmen who counted time well spent if spent in taking pains.

This ability, to take detail as a religion, has left us the precious
relics of the exquisite period immediately before the Italian artists
had their way in Brussels. Notice the weave here. See the pattern of
the fabrics worn by the personages of high estate. You could almost
pluck it from the tapestry, shake out its folds, measure it flat, by
the yard, and find its delicate, intelligent pattern neat and
unbroken. Wonderful weaver, magic hands, infinite pains, were those to
produce such an effect on our sated modern vision, all with a few
threads of silk and wool and gold.

Then there is the human face--it takes an artist to describe the
various faces with their beauty of modelling, their infinite variety
of type, their subtlety of expression. You can almost see the flushing
of the capillaries under the translucent skin, so fine are the mediums
of silk and wool under the magic handling of the talented weavers in
brilliant epochs. Not a detail in one of these older canvases of the
highest Gothic development has been neglected.

The modern places his point of interest, and, knowing the observer's
eye is to obediently linger there, he splashes the rest of his drawing
into careless subserviency. But these careful older drawings showed in
every inch of their execution a conscience that might put the Puritan
to shame. Note, even, the ring that is being handed to the lady in the
Mazarin tapestry of Mr. Morgan's (if yours is the happy chance to see
it). It was not sufficient for the weaver that it be a ring, but it
must be a ring set with a jewel, and that jewel must be the one
celebrated ever for its value; so in the canvas glows a carefully
rounded spot of pigeon-blood.

This exquisitely fine weaving of the period which trembled between the
Gothic and the Renaissance made possible the execution of the later
work--and yet, and yet, who shall say that the later is the superior
work? Vaunted as it is, one turns to it because one must, but with
entire fidelity of heart for the preceding manner.

In the high period of Brussels production, when the Renaissance was
well established there, through the cartoons of the