different ones, _vide_ _The Months_, _The Royal Residences_, _History of
Alexander_, etc., and the gorgeous _Life of Marie de Medici_. If these
notable examples were copied it is safe to conclude that many others
were.

The study of marks is left for another chapter, for, by this time,
even the enthusiast is wearying. There seems so much to learn in this
matter of investigating and identifying, and, after all, everything is
uncertain. One looks about at identified pieces in museums and private
collections, even among the dealers, and the discouraging thought
comes that other people can tell at a glance. But this is very far
from being true.

Even the savant studies long and investigates much before he gives a
positive classification of a piece that is not "pedigreed." Here is a
Flemish piece, here is a French, he will declare, and for the life of
you you cannot see the ear-marks that tell the ancestry. And so in all
humility you ask, "How can you tell with a glance of the eye?" But he
does not. No one can do that in every case. He must spend days at it,
reflecting, reading, handling, if the piece is evidently one of value.
He will show you, perhaps, as an honest dealer-collector showed me, a
set of five fine pieces which he could not identify at all. "The
weave," said he, "is Mortlake, the design in part German, these are
Italian _putti_--yet when all is told, I put down the work as an
Eighteenth Century copy of decadent Renaissance. But I am far from
sure."

If a dealer, surrounded by experienced helpers, can thus be
nonplussed, there is little cause for humiliation on the part of the
amateur who hesitates. It is not expected that one can know at a
glance whether a piece of work was executed in France, or in Flanders
at a given epoch. But the more difficult the work of identification,
the keener the zest of the hunt. It is then that one calls into
requisition all the knowledge of art that the individual has been
unconsciously accumulating all the years of his life. The applied
arts reflect the art feeling of the age to which they belong, and the
diluted influence of the great artists directs them. This is true of
drawing and of colour.

History has ever its reflection on arts and crafts, but perhaps it has
in tapestry its most intentional record. It is a forced and deliberate
piece of egoism when a monarch or a conqueror has a huge picture drawn
exhibiting his grandeur in battle or his elegance at home. In some
h