every reason to consider it as one of the most valuable historical monuments which France possesses.  It has also given rise to a great deal of archaeological discussion.  Montfaucon, Ducarel, and De La Rue, have come forward successively—­but more especially the first and last:  and Montfaucon in particular has favoured the world with copper-plate representations of the whole.  Montfaucon’s plates are generally much too small:  and the more enlarged ones are too ornamental.  It is right, first of all, that you should have an idea how this piece of tapestry is preserved, or rolled up.  You see it here, therefore, precisely as it appears after the person who shews it, takes off the cloth with which it is usually covered.

[Illustration]

The first portion of the needle-work, representing the embassy of Harold, from Edward the Confessor to William Duke of Normandy, is comparatively much defaced—­that is to say, the stitches are worn away, and little more than the ground, or fine close linen cloth, remains.  It is not far from the beginning—­and where the colour is fresh, and the stitches are, comparatively, preserved—­that you observe the PORTRAIT OF HAROLD.[147]

You are to understand that the stitches, if they may be so called, are threads laid side by side—­and bound down at intervals by cross stitches, or fastenings—­upon rather a fine linen cloth; and that the parts intended to represent flesh are left untouched by the needle.  I obtained a few straggling shreds of the worsted with which it is Worked.  The colours are generally a faded or bluish green, crimson, and pink.  About the last five feet of this extraordinary roll are in a yet more decayed and imperfect state than the first portion.  But the designer of the subject, whoever he was, had an eye throughout to Roman art—­as it appeared in its later stages.  The folds of the draperies, and the proportions of the figures, are executed with this feeling.

I must observe that, both at top and at bottom of the principal subject, there is a running allegorical ornament;[148] of which I will not incur the presumption to suppose myself a successful interpreter.  The constellations, and the symbols of agriculture and of rural occupation, form the chief subjects of this running ornament.  All the inscriptions are executed in capital letters of about an inch in length; and upon the whole, whether this extraordinary and invaluable relic be of the latter end of the XIth, or of the beginning or middle of the XIIth century[149] seems to me a matter of rather a secondary consideration.  That it is at once unique and important, must be considered as a position to be neither doubted nor denied, I have learnt, even here, of what importance this tapestry-roll was considered in the time of Bonaparte’s threatened invasion of our country:  and that, after displaying it at Paris for two or three months, to awaken the curiosity and excite the love of conquest among the citizens, it was conveyed to one or two sea-port towns, and exhibited upon the stage as a most important materiel in dramatic effect.[150]