barber's work; or, any of the
loves and conflicts of the Greek myths was used.

The colouring--too much cannot be seen of the warm, delicate
blendings. There is always the look of a flowerbed at dawn, before
Chanticleer's second call has brought the sun to sharpen outlines,
before dreams and night-mist have altogether quitted the place. Plenty
of warm wood colours are there, of lake blues, of smothered reds.
Precious they are to the eye, these scenes, but hard to find now
except in bits which some dealer has preserved by framing in a screen
or in the carved enclosure of some nut-wood chair.

For a time borders continued thus, all marked off without conscious
effort, into countless delicious scenes. Then a change begins. After
perfection, must come something less until the wave rises again. If in
Raphael's time the border claimed a two-foot strip for its imaginings,
it was slow in coming narrower again, and need required that it be
filled. But here is where the variance lay: Raphael had so much to
say that he begged space in which to portray it; his imitators had so
much space to fill that their heavy imagination bungled clumsily in
the effort. They filled it, then, with a heterogeneous mass of
foliage, fruit and flowers, trained occasionally to make a bower for a
woman, a stand for a warrior, but all out of scale, never keeping to
any standard, and lost absolutely in unintelligent confusion.

The Flemings in their decadence did this, and the Italians in the
Seventeenth Century did more, they introduced all manner of cartouche.
The cartouche plays an important part in the boasting of great
families and the sycophancy of those who cater to men of high estate,
for it served as a field whereon to blazon the arms of the patron, who
doubtless felt as man has from all time, that he must indeed be great
whose symbols or initials are permanently affixed to art or
architecture. The cartouche came to divide the border into medallions,
to apportion space for the various motives; but with a far less subtle
art than that of the older men who traced their airy arbours and
trailed their dainty vines and set their delicate grotesques, in a
manner half playful and wholly charming.

But when the cartouche appeared, what is the effect? It is as though a
boxful of old brooches had been at hand and these were set,
symmetrically balanced, around the frame, and the spaces between
filled with miscellaneous ornament on a scale of sumptuous