Well, this is all I have to say about the poor remains of the art of tapestry-weaving: and yet what a noble art it was once! To turn our chamber walls into the green woods of "the leafy month of June," populous of bird and beast; or a summer garden with man and maid playing round the fountains, or a solemn procession of the mythical warriors and heroes of old; that surely was worth the trouble of doing, and the money that had to be paid for it: that was no languid acquiescence in an upholsterer's fashion.

How well I remember as a boy my first acquaintance with a room hung with faded greenery at Queen Elizabeth's Lodge, - by Chingford Hatch, in Epping Forest (I wonder what has become of it now?), and the impression of romance that it made upon me! a feeling that always comes back on me when I read, as I often do, Sir Walter Scott's Antiquary, and come to the description of the Green Room at Monkbarns, amongst which the novelist has with such exquisite cunning of art imbedded the fresh and glittering verses of the summer poet Chaucer: yes, that was more than upholstery, believe me.

Nor must you forget that when the art was at its best, while on the one side it was almost a domestic art, and all sorts of naive fancies were embodied in it, it took the place in Northern Europe of the fresco painting of Italy; among the existing easel pictures of the Flemish school of the fifteenth century there are no designs which are equal in conception and breadth of treatment to those which were worked out in tapestry, and I believe that some of the very best Northern artists spent the greater part of their time in designing for this art Roger van der Weyden of the Cologue school is named as having done much in this way: under the gallery of the great hall at Hampton Court hangs a piece, which I suppose is by him, and which at any rate is, taking it altogether, the finest piece I have seen. There is quite a school of tapestry in the place, by the way: the withdrawing room or solar at the end of the hall is hung with tapestries, but little inferior to the first mentioned and perhaps a little later, but unluckily, unlike it, much obscured by the dirt of centuries (not faded, only dirty), while the main walls of the great hall itself are hung with work of a later date, say about 1580. You may test your taste by comparing these later works (very- fine of their kind) with the earlier, and seeing which you like best. I will not try to influence you on this matter, but will only say that the borders of this later tapestry are admirably skilful pieces of execution.

Perhaps you will think I have said too much about an art that has practically perished; but as there is nothing whatever to prevent us from reviving it if we please, since the technique of it is easy to the last degree, so also it seems to me that in the better days of art the- exaltation of certain parts of a craft into the region of the higher arts was both a necessary consequence of the excellence of the craft as a whole, and in return kept up that excellence to its due pitch by example; the magnificent woven pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the natural result of the pleasure and skill that were exercised in the art of weaving in every village and homestead, at the same time that they were an encouragement to the humbler brother of the craft to persevere in doing his best.

I have now to speak of a craft which I daresay some of you will think a lesser art indeed, but which nevertheless we cannot help considering if we are to trouble ourselves at all about the art- of weaving. This is the dyer's craft: of which I must say that no craft has been so oppressed by the philistinism of false commerce, or by the ignorance of the public as to their real wants; which oppression is of very late date, and belongs almost wholly to our own days.

I should very much like to be able to tell you the whole story of this ancient craft, but time fails me to give you more than the very barest outline of it.

The ancient Egyptians knew well the niceties of the art. I myself have dyed wool red by the self same process that the Mosaical dyers used; and from the remotest times the whole art was thoroughly understood in India If today I want for my own use some of the red dye above alluded to, I must send to Argolis or Acharnania for it; and Pliny would have been quite at home in the dye-house of Tintoretto's father (or master); no change at all befell the art either in the East or the North till after the discovery of America; this gave the dyers one new material in itself good, and one that was doubtful or bad. The good one was the new insect dye, cochineal, which at first was used only for dyeing crimson (or bluish red), and for this use cast into the shade the older red insect dye above alluded to, called by the classical peoples coccus, and by the Arabs Al kermes. The bad new material was logwood, so fugitive a dye as to be quite worthless as a colour by itself (as it was at first used), and to my mind of very little use otherwise. No other new dye-stuff of importance was found in America although the discoverers came across such abundance of red-dyeing wood growing there that a huge country of South America has thence taken its name of Brazil.

The next change happened about 163O, when a German discovered accidentally how to dye scarlet with cochineal on a tin basis, thereby putting the old dye, kermes, almost wholly out of commerce. 'Next, in the last years of the eighteenth century, a worthless blue was invented (which I don't name, to avoid confusion in this brief sketch). About the same time a rather valuable yellow dye (quercitron bark) was introduced from America. Next, in 1810, chemical science, which by this time had got fairly on its legs, began to busy itself about the dyer's craft, and discovered how to dye with Prussian blue, a colour which, as a pigment, had been discovered about eighty years before; this discovery was rather harmful than otherwise to my mind, but was certainly an important one, since before that time there was but one dyeing drug that could give a blue colour capable of standing a week of diffused daylight even,--indigo to wit, whether it was produced from tropical or sub-tropical plants, or from our 'Northern plant, woad.

Now these novelties, the sum of which amounts to very little, are all that make any difference between the practice of dyeing under Rameses the Great and under Queen Victoria, till about twenty years ago; about that time a series of the most wonderful discoveries were made by the chemists; discoveries which did the utmost credit to their skill, patience, and capacity for scientific research, and which, from a so-called commercial point of view, have been of the greatest importance; for they have, as the phrase goes, revolutionised the art of dyeing The dye stuffs discovered by the indefatigable genius of scientific chemists, which every one has heard of under the name of aniline colours, and which are the product of coal-tar, are brighter and stronger in colour than the old dyes, cheaper (much cheaper) in price, and, which is of course of the last importance to the dyer, infinitely easier to use. No wonder, therefore, that they have almost altogether supplanted the older dyes, except in a few cases: surely the invention seems a splendid one!

Well, it is only marred by one fact, that being an invention for the benefit of an art whose very existence depends upon its producing beauty, it is on the road, and far advanced on it, towards destroying all beauty in the art. The fact is, that every one of these colours is hideous in itself, whereas all the old dyes are in themselves beautiful colours only extreme perversity could make an ugly colour out of them. Under these circumstances it must, I suppose, be considered a negative virtue in the new dyes, that they are as fugitive as the older ones are stable; but even on that head I will ask you to note one thing that condemns them finally, that whereas the old dyes when fading, as all colours will do more or less, simply gradually changed into paler tints of the same colour, and were not unpleasant to look on, the fading of the new dyes is a change into all kinds of abominable and livid hues. I mention this because otherwise it might be thought that a man with an artistic eye for colour might so blend the hideous but bright aniline colours as to produce at least something tolerable; indeed, this is not unfrequently attempted today, but with small success, partly from the reason above mentioned, partly because the hues so produced by "messing about" as I should call it, have none of the quality or character which the simpler drug gives naturally: all artists will understand what I mean by this.

In short, this is what it comes to, that it would be better for us, if we cannot revive the now almost lost art of dyeing, to content ourselves with weaving our cloths of the natural colour of the fibre, or to buy them coloured by less civilised people than ourselves.

Now, really even if you think the art of dyeing as contemptible as Pliny did, you must admit that this is a curious state of things, and worth while considering, even by a philosopher. It is most true that the chemists of our day have made discoveries almost past belief for their wonder; they have given us a set of colours which has made a new thing of the dyer's craft; commercial enterprise has eagerly seized on the gift, and yet, unless all art is to disappear from our woven stuffs, we must turn round and utterly and simply reject it. We must relegate these new dyes to a museum of scientific curiosities, and for our practice go back, if not to the days of the Pharaohs, yet at least to those of Tintoret.

I say I invite you to consider this, because it is a type of the oppression under which the lesser arts are suffering at the present day.

The art of dyeing leads me naturally to the humble but useful art of printing on cloth; really a very ancient art, since it is not essential to it that the pattern should be printed; it may be painted by hand. Now, the painting of cloth with real dyes was practiced from the very earliest days in India; and, since the Egyptians of Pliny's time knew the art well, it is most probable that in that little-changing land it was very old also. Indeed many of the minute and elaborate patterns on the dresses of Egyptian imagery impress me strongly as representing what would naturally be the work of dye-painted linen.

As to the craft among ourselves, it has, as a matter of course, suffered grievously from the degradation of dyeing, and this not only from the worsening of the tints both in beauty and durability, but from a more intricate cause. I have said that the older dyes were much more difficult to use than the modern ones. The processes for getting a many coloured pattern on to a piece of cotton, even so short a while back as when I was a boy, were many and difficult. As a rule, this is done in fewer hours now than it was in days then. You may think this a desirable change, but, except on the score of cheapness, I can't agree with you. The natural and healthy difficulties of the old processes, all connected as they were with the endeavour to make the colour stable, drove any designer who had anything in him to making his pattern peculiarly suitable to the whole art, and gave a character to it--that character which you so easily recognise in Indian palampores, or in the faded curtains of our grandmothers' time, which still, in spite of many a summer's sun and many and many a strenuous washing, retain at least their reds and blues. In spite of the rudeness or the extravagance of these things, we are always attracted towards them, and the chief reason is, that we feel at once that there is something about the designs natural to the craft, that they can be done only by the practice of it; a quality which, I must once more repeat, is a necessity for all the designs of the lesser arts. But in the comparatively easy way in which these cloths are printed to-day, there are no special difficulties to stimulate the designer to invention; he can get any design done on his cloth; the printer will make no objections, so long as the pattern is the right size for his roller, and has only the due number of colours. The result of all this is ornament on the cotton, which might just as well have been printed or drawn on paper, and in spite of any grace or cleverness in the design, it is found to look poor and tame and wiry. That you will see clearly enough when some one has had a fancy to imitate some of the generous and fertile patterns that were once specially designed for the older cloths: it all comes to nothing--it is dull, hard, unsympathetic.

No; there is nothing for it but the trouble and the simplicity of the earlier craft, if you are to have any beauty in cloth-printing at all. And if not, why should we trouble to have a pattern of any sort on our cotton cloths? I for one am dead against it, unless the pattern is really beautiful; it is so very worthless if it is not.

As I have been speaking about printing on cotton cloths, I suppose I am bound to say something also on the quite modern and very humble, but, as things go, useful art of printing patterns on paper for wall hangings. But really there is not much to be said about it, unless we were considering the arrangement and formation of its patterns; because it is so very free from those difficulties the meeting and conquering of which give character to the more intricate crafts. I think the real way to deal successfully with designing for paper-hangings is to accept their mechanical nature frankly, to avoid falling into the trap of try-in" to make your paper look as if it were painted by hand. Here is the place, if anywhere, for dots and lines and hatchings: mechanical enrichment is of the first necessity in it. After that you may be as intricate and elaborate in your pattern as you please; nay, the more and the more mysteriously you interweave your sprays and stems the better for your purpose, as the whole thing has to be pasted flat on a wall, and the cost of all this intricacy will but come out of your own brain and hand. For the rest, the fact that in this art we are so little helped by beautiful and varying material imposes on us the necessity for being specially thoughtful in our designs; every one of them must have a distinct idea in it; some beautiful piece of nature must have pressed itself on our notice so forcibly that we are quite full of it, and can, by submitting ourselves to the rules of art, express our pleasure to others, and give them some of the keen delight that we ourselves have felt, If we cannot do this in some measure our paper design will not be worth much; it will be but a makeshift expedient for covering a wall with something or other; and if we really care about art we shall not put up with "something or other," but shall choose honest whitewash instead, on which sun and shadow play so pleasantly, if only our room be well planned and well shaped, and look kindly on us.

A great if indeed; which lands me at once into my next division of the lesser arts, which for want of a better word I will call house-furnishing: I say it lands me there, because if only our houses were built as they should be, we should want such a little furniture--and be so happy in that scantiness. Even as it is, we should at all events take as our maxim the less the better: excess of furniture destroys the repose of a lazy man, and is in the way of an industrious one; and besides, if we really care for art we shall always feel inclined to save on superfluities, that we may have wherewithal to spend on works of art.

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