Henry VIII., on his way to the Tower previous to his coronation, as wearing “a jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses.”  The favorites of James I. wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane.  Edward II. gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armor studded with jacinths, and a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parseme with pearls.  Henry II. wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove set with twelve rubies and fifty-two great pearls.  The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke of Burgundy of his race, was studded with sapphires and hung with pear-shaped pearls.

How exquisite life had once been!  How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration!  Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.

Then he turned his attention to embroideries, and to the tapestries that performed the office of frescos in the chill rooms of the Northern nations of Europe.  As he investigated the subject,—­and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up,—­he was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things.  He, at any rate, had escaped that.  Summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame, but he was unchanged.  No winter marred his face or stained his flower-like bloom.  How different it was with material things!  Where had they gone to?  Where was the great crocus-colored robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked for Athena?  Where the huge velarium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, on which were represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by [72] white gilt-reined steeds?  He longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for Elagabalus, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of Pontus, and were figured with “lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests, rocks, hunters,—­all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature;” and the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song beginning “Madame, je suis tout joyeux,” the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread, and each note, a square shape in those days, formed with four pearls.  He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy, and was decorated with “thirteen hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the king’s arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked in gold.”