size.
Confusing, this, and a far cry from harmony. Yet, such are the
seductions of tapestry in colour and texture, and so caressing is the
hand of time, that these borders of the Seventeenth Century given us
by Italy and Flanders, are full of interest and beauty.

The very bombast of them gives joy. Who can stand before the Barberini
set, _The Mysteries of the Life and Death of Jesus Christ_, bequeathed
to the Cathedral of St. John, the Divine, in New York, by Mrs. Clarke,
without being more than pleased to recognise in the border the
indefatigable Barberini bee? We are human enough to glance at the
pictures of sacred scenes as on a tale that is told, but that potent
insect makes us at once acquainted with a family of renown, puts us on
a friendly footing with a great cardinal of the house, reminds us of
sundry wanderings of our own in Rome; and then, suddenly flashes from
its wings a memory of the great conqueror of Europe, who after the
Italian campaign, set this bee among his own personal symbols and
called it Napoleonic. Yes, these things interest us enormously,
personally, for they pique imagination and help memory to fit together
neatly the wandering bits of history's jigsaw puzzle. Besides this,
they help the work of identifying old tapestries, a pleasure so keen
that every sense is enlivened thereby.

When decorative design deserts the Greek example, it strays on
dangerous ground, unless Nature is the model. The Italians of the
Seventeenth Century, tired of forever imitating and copying, lost all
their refinement in the effort to originate. Grossness, sensuality
took the place of fine purity in border designs. Inflation, so to
speak, replaced inspiration.

Amorini--the word can hardly be used without suggesting the gay babes
who tumble deliciously among Correggio's clouds or who snatch flowers
in ways of grace, on every sort of decoration. In these later
drawings, these tapestry borders of say 1650, they are monsters of
distortion, and resemble not at all the rosy child we know in the
flesh. They are overfed, self-indulgent, steeped in the wisdom of a
corrupt and licentious experience. I cannot feel that anyone should
like them, except as curiosities of a past century.

Heavy swags of fruit, searching for larger things, changed to
pumpkins, melons, in the gross fashion of enlarged designs for
borders. Almost they fell of their own weight. Cornucopias spilled
out, each one, the harvest of an acre. And thus p