advice upon designs for lace.  The composition of new patterns for lace was attempted, and old patterns which had degenerated were revised and redrawn for the use of the workers connected with the convents.  There are now twelve convents, Mr. Cole tells us, where instruction in drawing and in the composition of patterns is given, and some of the students have won some of the higher prizes offered by the Department of Science and Art for designing lace-patterns.

The Cork School of Art then acquired a collection of finely-patterned old laces, selections from which are freely circulated through the different convents connected with that school.  They have also the privilege of borrowing similar specimens of old lace from the South Kensington Museum.  So successful has been the system of education pursued by Mr. Brennan, the head-master of the Cork School of Art, that two female students of his school last year gained the gold and silver medals for their designs for laces and crochets at the national competition which annually takes place in London between all the Schools of Art in the United Kingdom.  As for the many lace-makers who were not connected either with the convents or with the art schools, in order to assist them, a committee of ladies and gentlemen interested in Irish lace-making raised subscriptions, and offered prizes to be competed for by designers generally.  The best designs were then placed out with lace-makers, and carried into execution.  It is, of course, often said that the proper person to make the design is the lace-maker.  Mr. Cole, however, points out that from the sixteenth century forward the patterns for ornamental laces have always been designed by decorative artists having knowledge of the composition of ornament, and of the materials for which they were called upon to design.  Lace pattern books were published in considerable quantity in Italy, France and Germany during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and from these the lace-makers worked.  Many lace-makers would, no doubt, derive benefit from practice in drawing, in discriminating between well and badly shaped forms.  But the skill they are primarily required to show and to develop is one of fine fingers in reproducing beautiful forms in threads.  The conception, arrangement, and drawing of beautiful forms for a design, have to be undertaken by decorative artists acquainted with the limitations of those materials and methods which the ultimate expression of the design involves.

This lovely Irish art of lace-making is very much indebted to Mr. Cole, who has really re-created it, given it new life, and shown it the true artistic lines on which to progress.  Hardly 20,000 pounds a year is spent by England upon Irish laces, and almost all of this goes upon the cheaper and commoner kinds.  And yet, as Mr. Cole points out, it is possible to produce Irish laces of as high artistic quality as almost any foreign laces.  The Queen, Lady Londonderry,