she had worked with gold and precious stones, and the cope and maniple of St. Cuthbert, which are preserved at Durham, are considered to be specimens of opus Anglicanum.  In the year 800, the Bishop of Durham allotted the income of a farm of two hundred acres for life to an embroideress named Eanswitha, in consideration of her keeping in repair the vestments of the clergy in his diocese.  The battle standard of King Alfred was embroidered by Danish princesses; and the Anglo-Saxon Gudric gave Alcuid a piece of land, on condition that she instructed his daughter in needle-work.  Queen Mathilda bequeathed to the Abbey of the Holy Trinity at Caen a tunic embroidered at Winchester by the wife of one Alderet; and when William presented himself to the English nobles, after the Battle of Hastings, he wore a mantle covered with Anglo-Saxon embroideries, which is probably, M. Lefebure suggests, the same as that mentioned in the inventory of the Bayeux Cathedral, where, after the entry relating to the broderie a telle (representing the conquest of England), two mantles are described—­one of King William, ’all of gold, powdered with crosses and blossoms of gold, and edged along the lower border with an orphrey of figures.’  The most splendid example of the opus Anglicanum now in existence is, of course, the Syon cope at the South Kensington Museum; but English work seems to have been celebrated all over the Continent.  Pope Innocent IV. so admired the splendid vestments worn by the English clergy in 1246, that he ordered similar articles from Cistercian monasteries in England.  St. Dunstan, the artistic English monk, was known as a designer for embroideries; and the stole of St. Thomas a Becket is still preserved in the cathedral at Sens, and shows us the interlaced scroll-forms used by Anglo-Saxon MS. illuminators.

How far this modern artistic revival of rich and delicate embroidery will bear fruit depends, of course, almost entirely on the energy and study that women are ready to devote to it; but I think that it must be admitted that all our decorative arts in Europe at present have, at least, this element of strength—­that they are in immediate relationship with the decorative arts of Asia.  Wherever we find in European history a revival of decorative art, it has, I fancy, nearly always been due to Oriental influence and contact with Oriental nations.  Our own keenly intellectual art has more than once been ready to sacrifice real decorative beauty either to imitative presentation or to ideal motive.  It has taken upon itself the burden of expression, and has sought to interpret the secrets of thought and passion.  In its marvellous truth of presentation it has found its strength, and yet its weakness is there also.  It is never with impunity that an art seeks to mirror life.  If Truth has her revenge upon those who do not follow her, she is often pitiless to her worshippers.  In Byzantium the two arts met—­Greek art, with its intellectual sense of form, and its quick