In the eighteenth century, Venice, finding that laces of lighter texture were sought after, set herself to make rose-point; and at the Court of Louis XV. the choice of lace was regulated by still more elaborate etiquette.  The Revolution, however, ruined many of the manufactures.  Alencon survived, and Napoleon encouraged it, and endeavoured to renew the old rules about the necessity of wearing point-lace at Court receptions.  A wonderful piece of lace, powdered over with devices of bees, and costing 40,000 francs, was ordered.  It was begun for the Empress Josephine, but in the course of its making her escutcheons were replaced by those of Marie Louise.

M. Lefebure concludes his interesting history by stating very clearly his attitude towards machine-made lace.  ’It would be an obvious loss to art,’ he says, ’should the making of lace by hand become extinct, for machinery, as skilfully devised as possible, cannot do what the hand does.’  It can give us ’the results of processes, not the creations of artistic handicraft.’  Art is absent ’where formal calculation pretends to supersede emotion’; it is absent ’where no trace can be detected of intelligence guiding handicraft, whose hesitancies even possess peculiar charm . . . cheapness is never commendable in respect of things which are not absolute necessities; it lowers artistic standard.’  These are admirable remarks, and with them we take leave of this fascinating book, with its delightful illustrations, its charming anecdotes, its excellent advice.  Mr. Alan Cole deserves the thanks of all who are interested in art for bringing this book before the public in so attractive and so inexpensive a form.

Embroidery and Lace:  Their Manufacture and History from the Remotest Antiquity to the Present Day.  Translated and enlarged by Alan S. Cole from the French of Ernest Lefebure. (Grevel and Co.)

THE POETS’ CORNER—­VIII

(Pall Mall Gazette, November 16, 1888.)

A few years ago some of our minor poets tried to set Science to music, to write sonnets on the survival of the fittest and odes to Natural Selection.  Socialism, and the sympathy with those who are unfit, seem, if we may judge from Miss Nesbit’s remarkable volume, to be the new theme of song, the fresh subject-matter for poetry.  The change has some advantages.  Scientific laws are at once too abstract and too clearly defined, and even the visible arts have not yet been able to translate into any symbols of beauty the discoveries of modern science.  At the Arts and Crafts Exhibition we find the cosmogony of Moses, not the cosmogony of Darwin.  To Mr. Burne-Jones Man is still a fallen angel, not a greater ape.  Poverty and misery, upon the other hand, are terribly concrete things.  We find their incarnation everywhere and, as we are discussing a matter of art, we have no hesitation in saying that they are not devoid of picturesqueness.  The etcher or the painter finds in them ‘a subject made to his hand,’ and the poet has admirable opportunities of drawing weird and dramatic contrasts between the purple of the rich and the rags of the poor.  From Miss Nesbit’s book comes not merely the voice of sympathy but also the cry of revolution: