me sort of border was needed, a division
line between the world of reality and the world of fable. Examine the
Arras work and see to what tricks the artist had recourse. The
architectural resource of columns, for example; where he could do so,
the artist decoyed one to the margin. Thus he slipped in a frame, and
broke none of the canons of his art, and no more beautiful frame could
have been devised, as we see by following up the development and use
of the column. Once out from its position in the edge of the picture
into its post in the border, it never stops in its beauty of growth
until it reaches such perfection as is seen in the twisted and
garlanded columns which flank the Rubens series, and those superb
shafts in _The Royal Residences_ of Lebrun at the Gobelins under Louis
XIV.

The other trick of framing in his subject which was open to the Arras
weaver whom we call Gothic, was to set verses, long lines of print in
French or Latin at top or bottom.

But his first real legitimate border was made of the same flowers and
leaves that made graceful the finials and capitals of Gothic carving.
Small clustered fruit, like grapes or berries, came naturally mixed
with these, as Nature herself gives both fruit and flowers upon the
earth in one fair month.

Simplicity was the thing, and a continued turning to Nature, not as to
a cult like a latter-day nature-student, but as a child to its mother,
or a hart to the water brook. As even in a border, stayed between two
lines of solid-coloured galloon, flowers and fruit do not stand
forever upright without help, the weaver gave probability to his
abundant mass by tying it here and there with a knot of ribbon and
letting the ribbon flaunt itself as ribbons have ever done to the
delight of the eye that loves a truant.

By this time--crawling over the top of the Fourteen Hundreds--the
border had grown wider, had left its meagre allowance of three or four
inches, and was fast acquiring a foot in width. This meant more
detail, a broader design, coarser flowers, bigger fruit, and these
spraying over the galloon, and all but invading the picture. It was
all in the way of development. The simplicity of former times was
lost, but design was groping for the great change, the change of the
Renaissance.

The border tells quickly when it dawned, and when its light put out
all candles like a glorious sun--not forgetting that some of those
candles would better have been left burning. By