interest to us, because his possessions
fell into a place where we can see them by taking a little trouble.
Some of them are among the treasures in the museum at Nancy and at
Berne in Switzerland. How they got there is in itself a matter of
history, the history of a war between Burgundy and Switzerland.

Like all the line of these half-barbaric, picturesque dukes, Charles
could not disassociate himself from magnificence, which in those days
took the place of comfort. When making war, he endeavoured to have his
camp lodgment as near as possible reproduce the elegance of his home.
In his campaign against Switzerland, his tent was entirely hung with
the most magnificent of tapestries. After foolhardy onslaughts on a
people whose strength he miscalculated, he lost his battles, his
life--and his tapestries. And this is how certain Burgundian
tapestries hang in the cathedral at Berne, and in the museums at
Nancy.[11]

The simple Swiss mountaineers, accustomed more to expediency than to
luxury, are said to have been entirely ignorant of the value of their
spoils of war. Tapestries they had never seen, nor had they the
experienced eye to discern their beauties; but cloth, thick woollen
cloth, that would protect shivering man from the cold, was a commodity
most useful; so, many of the fine products of the high-warp looms that
had augmented the pride of their noble possessor, found their way into
shops and were sold to the Swiss populace in any desired length,
according to bourgeois household needs, a length for a warm bed-cover,
or a square for a table; and thus disappeared so many that we are
thankful for the few whole hangings of that time which are ours to
inspect, and which represent the best work of the day both from Arras
and from Brussels, which was then (about 1476) beginning to produce.

There is a special and local reason why we should be interested in the
products of the high-warp tapestries in the time of the greatest power
of the Dukes of Burgundy. It is that we can have the happy experience
of studying, in our own country, a set of these hangings, and this
without going farther than to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York, where repose the set called _The Sacraments_. (Plates facing
pages 34, 38 and 39.) There are in all seven pieces, although the
grounds are well taken that the set originally included one more. They
represent the four Sacraments of Baptism, Marriage, Confirmation and
Extreme Unction, fir