the cunning artist has done. His problem was to picture twelve
country houses. To his mind it must have seemed like converting a room
into an architect's office, to hang it full of buildings. But genius
came to the front, his wonderful feeling for decoration, and lo, he
filled his canvas with glorious foreground, full of things man lives
with; columns, the size appropriate to the salon they are placed in;
urns, peacocks, all the ante-terrace frippery of the grand age,
arranged in the foreground. Garlands are fresh hung on the columns as
though our decorator had but just posed them, and beyond are clustered
trees--with a small opening for a vista. Way off in the light-bathed
distance stands the faithfully drawn chateau, but here, here where the
observer stands, is all elegance and grace and welcome shade, and
close friendship with luxury.

This work of Lebrun's is then the epitome of border. Greater than this
hath no man done, to make a tapestry all border which yet so
intensified the value of the small central design, that not even the
royal patron, jealous of his own conspicuousness, discovered that art
had replaced display.

After that a great change came. As the picture ever regulates the
border, that change was but logical. After the "Sun King" came the
regency of the effeminate Philippe, whom the Queen Mother had kept
more like a court page than a man. Artists lapped over from the
previous reign, and these were encouraged to develop the smaller,
daintier, more effeminate designs that had already begun to assert
their charm. Borders took on the new method. And as small space was
needed for the curves and shells and latticed bands, the border
narrower grew.

Like Alice, after the potent dose, the border shrank and shrank, until
in time it became a gold frame, like the _encadrement_ of any easel
picture. And that, too, was logical, for tapestries became at this
time like painted pictures, and lost their original significance of
undulating hangings.

The well-known motives of the Louis XV decoration rippled around the
edge of the tapestry, woven in shades of yellow silk and imitated well
the carved and gilded wood of other frames, those of chairs and
screens and paintings. There are those who deplore the mode, but at
least it seems appropriate to the style of picture it encloses.

And here let us consider a moment this matter of appropriateness. So
far we have thought only of tapestries and their borders as
inse