your two fine horses by such stupid names | if he were making room for himself, he be as Castor and Pollux ?"

"Nevertheless," said the Doctor, eagerly, "Castor was said to have great skill in the management of horses, eh, eh?"

66

Certainly," said the Count. "And both together they foretell good weather, which is a fine thing in driving."

"And they were the gols of boundaries," cried the Doctor.

"And they got people out of trouble when everything seemed all over," returned the Count," which may also happen to our phaeton."

"And and and" here the Doctor's small face fairly gleamed with a joke, and he broke into a thin, high chuckle "they ran away with two ladies- eh, eh, eh? Did they not, did they not?"

gan to sing Freiligrath's picturesque soldier-song to the wild and warlike and yet stately music which Dr. Löwe has written for it. What a rare voice he had, too! — deep, strong, and resonant — that seemed to throw itself into the daring spirit of the music with an absolute disregard of delicate graces or sentimental effect; a powerful, masculine, soldier-like voice, that had little flute-like softness, but the strength and thrill that told of a deep chest, and that interpenetrated or rose above the loudest chords that his ten fingers struck. Queen Tita's face was overspread with surprise; Bell unconsciously laid down the map, and stood as one amazed. The ballad, you know, tells how, one calm night on the banks of the Danube, just after the great storming of Belgrade, a young trumpeter in the camp determines to leave aside cards for a while, and make a right good song for the army to sing; how he sets to work to tell the story of the battle in ringing verse, and at last, when he has got the rhymes correct, he makes the notes too, and his song is complete. "Ho, ye white troops and ye red troops, come round and listen!" he cries; and then he The Lieutenant was out of this matter, sings the record of the great deeds of so he flung himself down into an easy Prince Eugene; and lo! as he repeats the chair, and presently had both of the boys air for a third time, there breaks forth, on his knees, telling them stories and pro- with a hoarse roar as of thunder, the chorus pounding arithmetical conundrums alter-"Prinz Eugen der edle Ritter!" until nately. When Queen Titania came to release him, the young rebels refused to go; and one of them declared that the Count had promised to sing the "Wacht am Rhein."

Presently we went into the drawingroom, and there the women were found in a wild maze of maps, eagerly discussing the various routes to the North, and the comparative attractions of different towns. The contents of Mr. Stanford's shop seemed to have been scattered about the room, and Beil had armed herself with an opisometer, which gave her quite an air of importance.

"Oh, please don't," said Bell, suddenly turning round, with a map of Cumberland half hiding her. "You don't know that all the organs here have it. But if you would be so good as to sing us a German song, I will play the accompaniment for you, if I know it, and I know a great many."

the sound of it is carried even into the Turkish camp. And then the young trumpeter, not dissatisfied with his performance, proudly twirls his moustache; and finally sneaks away to tell of his triumph to the pretty Marketenderin. When our young Uhlan rose from the piano he laughed in an apologetic fashion; but there was still in his face some of that glow and fire which had made him forget himself during the singing of the ballad, and which had lent to his voice that penetrating resonance that still seemed to linger about the room. Bell said "Thank you" in rather a timid fashion; but Queen Tita did not speak at all, and seemed to have forgotten

Of course, the women did not imagine that a man who had been accustomed to a soldier's life, and who betrayed a faculty for grooming horses, was likely to know us. much more of music than a handy chorus, but the Count, lightly saying that he would not trouble her, went over to the piano, and sat down unnoticed amid the general hum of conversation.

But the next moment there was sufficient silence. For with a crash like thunder" Hei! das klang wie Ungewitter!"-the young Lieutenant struck the first chords of "Prinz Eugen," and with a sort of upward toss of the head, as

We had more music that evening, and Bell produced her guitar, which was expected to solace us much on our journey. It was found that the Lieutenant could play that too; and he executed at least a very pretty accompaniment when Bell sang "Der Tyroler und sein Kind." But you should have seen the face of Master Arthur, when Bell volunteered to sing a German song. I believe she did it to show that she was not altogether frightened by

the gloomy and mysterious silence which he preserved, as he sat in a corner and stared at everybody.

So ended our first day and to-morrow why, to-morrow we pass away from big cities and their suburbs, from multitudes of friends, late hours, and the whirl of amusements and follies, into the still seclusion of English country life, with its simple habits, and fresh pictures, and the quaint humours of its inns.

take care," but to the art of lace-making that axiom certainly can no longer be applied, since every year now gives us one or more works on the history, or on the reproduction of Lace.

Books on both these topics stand at the head of our article; books, some of which might, with great propriety, have been treated of separately under their respective heads, did they not all bear on Lacemaking as one of the Fine Arts. By a Fine Art is meant one of those methods by which men of taste, intellect, and [Note by Queen Titania, written at Twick- originality have been able first to express enham.-"The foregoing pages give a more or themselves, and then to appeal to the less accurate account of our setting-out, but taste and intelligence of their own and of they are all wrong about Bell. Men are far future generations. It matters not what worse than women in imagining love-affairs, be the material, whether it be marble, and supposing that girls think about nothing else. Bell wishes to be let alone. If gentlemen bronze, canvas, or but a linen thread, fine care to make themselves uncomfortable about as that which Arachne span: whether the her, she cannot help it; but it is rather unfair to drag her into any such complications. I am positive that, though she has doubtless a little pity for that young man who vexes himself and his friends because he is not good enough for her, she would not be sorry to see him, and Count von Rosen- and some one else besides· all start off on a cruise to Australia. She is quite content to be as she is. Marriage will come in good time; and when it comes, she will get plenty of it, sure enough. In the meantime, I hope she will not be suspected of encouraging those idle flirtations and pretences of worship with which gentlemen think they ought to approach every girl whose good fortune it is not to T."]

be married.

-

From The Edinburgh Review. LACE-MAKING AS A FINE ART.* THERE used to be an old saying, that "of the smallest matters the law does not

SER.

1. A History of Lace. By Mrs. BURY PALLI

2nd edition. London: 1870.

2. Catalogue of a Colection of Lace and Needlework, with a list of books on the same subject, both formed by and in the possession of Mrs. Hailstone, of Horton Hall, and exhibited at Leeds. Privately printed: 1868.

3. Designs for Lace-making. By S. H. LILLA HAILSTONE. London: 1870. Printed for private distribution.

4. Origine ed uso delle Trine a filo di refe. Genova: 1864 Privately printed for the Costabili-Caselli nuptials.

5. Handbook of Greek Lace-making. By J. H. 2nd edition. Printed for private circulation. London: 1870.

6. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Lace and Embroidery in the South Kensington Museum. By Mrs. BURY PALLISER. London: 1870.

7. Textile Fabrics: a Descriptive Catalogue of the Church Vestments, Silks, Stuffs, Needlework, and Tapestries, forming that section of the South Kensington Museum. By the Very Rev. DANIEL ROCK, D.D.: 1870.

8. Official Reports of the Various Sections of the

tool be the chisel, the pencil, or the needle, so that the hand of the artist be but present: and it is from the presence in Lacemaking both of harmonious design and of suitable execution that we claim for it a place as one of the Fine Arts.

Its object is ornamentation; it belongs to that Beautiful which it is so good to have about us after the Needful is already there, not only on account of the pleasure which it gives, but because its very presence indicates leisure, refinement, and a cultivation of the artistic sense. The title of Lace-making to rank among the Arts is a valid one, and it is one which would be more commonly recognized had not the history of Lace passed into the province of the antiquarian, in the same way that its reproduction by hand and loom has become one of the charitable and industrial interests of the day. The artist has been too much driven from the field, or only appears as a collector of old and curious specimens, so that an absence of artistic feeling characterizes too many of the modern works on the subject, yet it is our intention to show that as this was not the

Exhibition: Fine Arts Division. Part IV. Lon. don : 1871.

.

9. Report on Educational Works and Appliances in the Indian Department of the London International Exhibition, 1871. By GEORGE SMITH, Esq., LL.D. Edinburgh. London: 1871.

10. The Lace-makers. By Mrs. MEREDITH. London: 1865.

11. Les Guipures d'Art. Par Mme. GOUBAUD. London: 1869. 12. Pillow Lace. By Mde. GOUBAUD. London: 1871.

13. A History of Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures. By WILLIAM FELKIN. London: 1867.

14. Katalog der im Germanischen Museum befind lichen Gewebe und Stickereien, Nadelarbeiten und Spitzen, aus alterer Zeit. Nurnberg: 1869.

case in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-, Were this plan once introduced we are turies, so neither ought it to be so in our persuaded that it would never go out of

own.

fashion, for it is exceedingly simple. It is
true that a great scholar is reported to
have once (when extremely drunk) made
use of a very improper expression with
regard to the “nature of things;
and yet,
in spite of the annoyance which it may
have once caused Porson, it is "the na-
ture of things," and nothing but "the na-
ture of things," that can stand the collec-
tor in good stead in his search after knowl-
edge.

Lace is then of three kinds: needle-made or point, cushion-made, or bobbin-lace, and machine-wrought; and these three kinds are so distinct as never to be confounded, and to have their separate standards of merit. A fourth place might perhaps be found for the composite class of application laces, in which all the three methods are mixed, as when pillow-made sprigs of Brussels, or Honiton, are applied by hand to a ground of machine-made net.

As a book full of antiquarian research, or of curious statistics, Mrs. Bury Palliser's volume merits its place at the head of our list. Nowhere perhaps would it be possible to find under the head of Lace a greater number of historical and archæological facts than she has collected in this book, which forms a real history of Lace, illustrative of the manners of past generations and of distant countries, while it is illustrated by many beautiful and wellrendered designs. In this way Mrs. Bury Palliser has supplied a want, and she has managed to make her subject popular by much of the gossip of history. If her modern statistics are not valuable, it is because all questions of wages and labour, demand and supply, depend on fluctuating causes which are sometimes obscure and often unexpected, since, we have just seen, a national struggle and an internecine war, can, in the space of a few months, revolu- In order to be able to give the more untionize many local manufactures, and ren- divided attention to the two first, we will der former tables of figures out of date, at once dismiss this hybrid class, while for and worthless. There is, however, one re- all details as to the third species of Lace, spect in which this History of Lace has not we content ourselves by referring the answered expectation: we mean with re-reader to Mr. Felkin's volume. The ingard to the classification and nomenclature of Lace. Some of the curious errors which occurred in its first edition have been removed from the present one, but not the less must a collector, wishing to identify his specimens, and to learn how they were made, where they were made, and when they were made, rise from the perusal of this book more puzzled than informed, particularly when he sees We now propose to speak of needlename point applied to fabrics which never made or point lace, which is first in order were made, and never could be made with of value, and also of antiquity, being dethe needle. This is a dealer's error, really rived from the practice of needlework out of place in the book of a connoisseur, among the Eastern nations, and which in a term often ignorantly used in shops, but parts of Italy and Spain is still known by which it would be unpardonable to misap-its Eastern name of recami or reccammata. ply in a museum, and no amount of antiquarian notes will avail to distinguish between laces if those broad distinctions are lost sight of by which alone Lace can be correctly classified.

the

With regard to laces, ancient and modern, it is a pity that no "natural system of classification has ever been laid down. The collection exhibited at Leeds, by Mrs. Hailstone, in 1868, was indeed so classified, and it is only to be regretted that its owner did not in her beautiful catalogue more fully explain the reasons which had actuated her when she named her specimens on the best and simplest of all plans, namely, in right of their nature only.

tention and progress of the Lace-making loom is there well traced and recorded by him, from the time that this miracle of ingenuity was first thought of in 1760, down to its latest development, and we think that machine-wrought lace has a future before it in the increasing luxury of our dwelling-houses, and in the improved teaching of our schools of design.

This is the rarest, the most artistic, and, in many of its kinds, the most lasting of laces, while by means of its varied stitches numbers of objects can be well represented; thus flowers, fruits, figures, coats of arms, sacred emblems, and the best geometrical designs are to be seen among the trophies of the patient needle.

This point-lace is divisible into many sub-classes. Of these are rose, or raised point, called in France, dentelle à fleurs volantes. Point-coupé, or cutwork; guipure,* or

* The derivation of this word is much disputed. strument pour faire la frange torse." Bescherelle says it comes from "guipoire-un inThe Vene tians, judging from their own habit of transposing

whipped; i.e. over-headed work, sewed over thrown across the pillow, and plaited a rolled stuffing of parchment or cotton. round a number of pins; each pin reprePunti a maglia, work darned in upon the sents a mesh, and in the work the threads meshes of a netted (reticella) ground, and traversing as they do from left to right, called in France point-compté, because these and right to left often weave at once the meshes are counted for the design. Punti pattern and the ground. The work is far posati is our laid-work. Punti tirati is more laborious than could be imagined by drawn-work, where, as in hemstitch, all the anyone who had not tried it, though, by warp threads are drawn out, and the woof the position of the pillow, its fatigue can ones are drawn together, and oversewed on be greatly diminished or increased. The a pattern. Punti a stuora, is work on a English worker lays the pillow on her lap, coarse mat-like foundation: punti in gassi, the Bohemian places it on a small stand on the contrary, was probably on a réseau in front of her, but the peasant of the Vosground, as a Spanish dictionary says it is ges sits on a very low stool, and takes "muy delgada y trasparente." Punti reali is, what she calls her tambour between her like satin-stitch, worked on a close material knees, while she reproduces with astonishpreviously existing, and therefore belonging rapidity those small medallions and ing to a class of the true recami. This is sprigs, for every one of which perhaps the plumetis of the French brodeuse, and many dozen bobbins have to be kept in we have seen the robe of a West African motion. savage elaborately covered with designs in this stitch, which were supposed to have a heraldic signification, and which were certainly admirably executed. Chainstitch, the tambour of France and Scotland, is sparingly used in these old designs, where the stitch preferred to all others was that button-hole stitch by which the exquisite Venetian punt in are was formed on the foundation of a single thread.

Yet work done in this way, being as it were semi-mechanical, and admitting of a greater division of labour, must be in a measure inferior to true needle-made laces: being less deliberate, less finished, and less purely under the worker's own control, it is by so much a less perfect expression of any man's mind. It is less artistic, less spontaneous, it is more quickly made, and is therefore rather less costly. Not the The grounds of these true point laces are less, however, do some of the fine cushionof distinct kinds: the best is the réseau, laces, such as the coral-pattern of Naples when the pattern lies on a net ground, as and Lombardy, the schlangenmuster of Gerin the laces of Burano, Alençon, Argentan, many, and the sprigs of Brussels and Honand in the other needle points of Angle-iton, deserve the greatest admiration, terre and Brussels. When parts of the design are connected with what look like small knotted cords, these are termed the brides, and the knots, or thorns, called the picots, are the test of a good worker.*

The second kind of Lace is the pillow, or bobbin-nade. This also is handwrought, and in it, by an ingenious association of threads, a wandering plait, more or less intricate, forms an agreeable design. As the root of ali point-lace is to be found in needlework, so the root of all bobbin-made lace is to be found in a braid (lacet), or plait, made by weaving and plaiting threads together on a precise pattern or plan. The threads, fastened to small bobbins of bone, lead, or wood,† are

while in the modern fabric to which the nickname of "cluny" is given, we have copies on the pillow of some of the best point designs of the sixteenth century.

From the causes we have mentioned cushion-lace must of course be less fitted than is point for rendering the forms of natural objects: thus scrolls, arabesques, coral patterns, vandyke borders, and flowers of a conventional type have ever formed the staple of its designs, both in past centuries and in its present fashionable phase of reproduction by tape. One of its most homely forms is the coarse torchon lace to be found in France, Portugal, Galicia, Bohemia, Madeira, Dalecarlia, and the Tyrol, and which, now with one ground and now with another, may be seen eaging altar-cloths in small and poor churches.

Pillow-laces, especially when they have network grounds, should be judged entirely from these fonds or grounds. The old ones, such as Mechlin, have generally a hexagonal mesh; but the fond of modern

* Torchon, literally, a duster, a coarse cloth.