CHINESE DYES.
[To zee EDITOR OF THR " SPECTATOR:1 Sra,—A friend from China has just displayed before my dazzled eyes pieces of marvellous old silk embroidery, brought thence—unfaded as when newly sewn, and of tints which outflash the humming-birds, as magically harmonized, as perfectly balanced in the quantities of hues and shades of opposed colours, not to speak of the microscopically accurate needlework of their execution. But my abiding thought has been the delicate soft beauty of the dyes—how soft yet how pure the colours—and why cannot we learn to dye like this ? We have lost the crude and "screaming" German aniline dyes—why can we not go to school to China and learn some of their processes which produced these magic tints ? True, the perfect "eye for colour" is, like the ear for music and for verse, an "art unteachable, untaught " ; but surely we might learn, as to dyes and other materials, more in China than In
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