Patience and Skill
'Simple Stitch-Patterns for-Embroidery. By Anne Brandon.. Jones. (Batsford. 3s. 6d. not.) THE history of any craft requiring great patience and "care as well as skill (indeed, in this connexion, one might say mere skill) irievitably leadS the reader to poignant considers:- tion of the times we live in. Perhaps this consideration is especially poignant with " regard to needlework. As we examine in turn the five hundred odd specimens illustrated in Messrs. Seligman and Hughes' great volume, we are bound to reflect sadly upon a long leisurecl'age which has passed by, when women (though not only women) were able to devote years of diligence, loving or otherwise, as the case may be, to the decoration of ordinary objects of domestic use. That they did so, and that their children were trained at a tender age to the craft, we have ample evidence before us in this and in the smaller book devoted solely to samplers. That the age of patience has indeed gone is ruthlessly suggested by Miss Anne Brandon-JoneS, whose" aim is to help " women . with little leisure for fine Work," teachers, dressmakers and members of Women's Institutes the rudiments of the coarsest sort of simple embroidery which to seventeenth-century work is as granite is to marble.
To the authors of Domestic Needlework we should be grateful for choosing objects for illustration not on view at the museums so that with the plates in this book, seventy- five of which are well reprodUced in colour, for study, and the actual specimens at 'the Victoria and Albert Museum and elseWhere for reference, the student may be well supplied with information without. going fiuther afield: An amazing number of articles in daily -use were decorated in this manner. Scissor-cases, falcon's lures and hoods, bellows, comb-cases, - muffs and caskets, besides various parts of men's and women's
attire. These last 'include braces, which, we learn, were introduced in their present forin from Italy towards the end- of the eighteenth century. .Indeed, the text of this volume is a valuable addition to the history of costume.
The authors maintain that one William Rider knitted the first pair of stockings in England,' and that this was presented either to Edward VI or to William, Earl of Pembroke. Amongst the • illustrations we see stockings and tasselled garters of James I's time not at all dissimilar, though of a more sumptuous order, from those in current use. Shoes were decorated with embroidery from the seventeenth century, when the art was superb, down to the late 'nine- teenth, when atrocious" designs "in Berlin wool adorned the slippers said to have been presented by traditional spinsters to traditional curates. Muffs, sometimes of great beauty and often worn by men, are illustrated in a book by Cesare Vecellio, published in Venice in 1590.
' Whilst remembering with appreciation that Domestic .Needlework is copiously illustrated, it must be remarked
that the paper on the text is printed is poor. Mr. Ashton's much smaller work is, in these respects, more pleasing. -The history of • samplers begins in the early seventeenth century. Their use seems to have been as flinch.: to keep children's Angers busy as for practical guidance :---
" This I have done, „I thank my God, Without the correction of the red."— . _ • . _ was exquisitely worked on Elizabeth Clements' sampler in 1712, though a more favoured piety commonly extracted the dismal couplet :— " When I am dead and laid in grave and all my bones are rotten, By this I may remembered be, when I should be forgotten."
Mr. Ashton's book will prove invaluable both to the -student
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