and we may hope to their own satisfaction,
unless they were hungry, and tantalized by
our inaccessible presence. Poets compare
human eyes to stars. It struck us that we
preferred those real stars, shining through
the wall, to certain glittering human eyes
which a lady once saw shining from her wall.
As the story goes, this poor lady—destined
to a terrible fright—was sitting alone before
the fire, opposite a mirror which rested on
the mantelpiece, and taking off her jewelled
necklace and bracelets before retiring to rest,
when she looked up accidentally and saw
in the, mirror—what must have made a
tapestried room terrible to her as long as
she lived—for it was in a room hung with
tapestry that she was sitting. She saw
shining eyes rolling in the head of one of the
woven figures, a sight which we, safe from
all ambush of the kind, can never think of
without a quiver of sympathetic dread. She
knew that a thief was watching her, and that
there must be some accomplice in the house
who had cut out the eyes of the figure to
enable him to do so. She did not go into
hysterics, nor do anything else that was not to
the purpose. She took no notice, sat awhile
longer without looking into the mirror;—no
doubt with a deadly horror of being
approached from behind. She unfastened some
part of her dress, yawned, put on a natural
appearance of sleepiness, lighted her chamber
candle, locked her jewel case, and—the only
suspicious proceeding—left it on the table,
walked steadily towards the eyes, the door
being in that direction, quickly took the
key from the lock, left the room, locked
the door on the outside, and quietly went
to seek help which she could better trust
than that of her own servants. Such is
one of the horrible stories which belong to
the days of tapestry hangings, those curtain-
coverings for walls which are perhaps the
most objectionable of all modes of decorating
apartments.

This is downright heresy, no doubt, in
the eyes of those who make the pursuit of
tapestry an idolatry. Nobody doubts the
vast amount of pains and care spent on
tapestry as an art. Nobody doubts the skill
which so directed the shuttle or the needle as
that they rivalled the pencil and the brush
in their delineations. In fact, no art could
be despised which employed the talents of the
greatest painters; and while the cartoons of
Raffaelle are associated in our minds with
tapestry hangings, it is impossible to speak
with disrespect of such a representative of
the art of a past century. But we may be
glad that it belonged to a past century, and
that the present has done with tapestry. It
might be necessary, in the days of imperfect
building, to keep out draughts. King Alfred
might have been glad of it before he invented
his lantern, and when his candles were flaring
and wasting so as to baffle him in his measurement
of time by their burning; but we, in
our tight houses, whose walls have no chinks
and cracks, may better hang our apartments
with clean, and light, and wholesome paper,
which harbours no vermin, screens no thieves,
and scares no fever patient with night-visions
of perplexity and horror.

It does not appear, however, that tapestry
was invented to cover defects in the building
of walls. From the little we know, it may
rather be inferred that it was first used as a
convenient imitation of the more ancient
decoration of painted walls. The first tapestries
which are seen fluttering amidst the shadows
of remote history, were in the East, and of the
same monstrous order of delineation with
the Egyptian decorations, which so many
travellers have described for a thousand years
past. The Egyptians used to paint the scenes
of their lives and deaths,—their occupations,
amusements, their funerals, and their mythology,
upon the massive walls of their temples
and tombs. There seems to be no doubt that
the convenience of making these pictures
moveable gave rise to the manufacture of
woven hangings. One striking instance of
this is on record, in the case of the hangings
of the Tabernacle which Moses caused to be
made in the desert. The description of the
animals wrought on that tapestry answers
exactly to that of the walls of an Egyptian
temple; and it is the opinion of learned men
that the Greeks, as well as the Hebrews,
thence derived their notions of fantastic
composite creatures—griffins, centaurs, and the
like, which certainly were wrought in
tapestries for the Greeks by Oriental workmen.
After a time, the Greeks substituted prettier
objects in the centres of their hangings, and
drew off all the monstrosities into the borders.
In like manner, during the Middle Ages,
when tapestries were gifts for kings to bestow
and to receive, there was great beauty of
design and infinite delicacy of execution in
the finer tapestries, on which artists spent
their best pains, and kings spent a vast
amount of money.

We must not suppose that all
hangings were like those that our Henry the
Eighth fostered, or the French Henry the
Fourth and Louis the Fourteenth. While
the royal and the rich hung their palaces and
their mansions with such fabrics as the
Gobelin tapestry, the less wealthy were content
with plain velvet, with worsted stuff, with
any thing that would hide their unsightly
walls, and keep them warm in their ill-built
houses. The best and the worst were alike a
nuisance in a dwelling-house. They imbibed
the smoke; they grew mouldy with damp;
and, in hot weather, they gave out a worse
plague (if there be a worse) than the
mosquitoes of tropical countries. It appears to
us, in our cleanly times, that our grandfathers
knew nothing about this kind of delicacy.
After the rushes on the floor, (which were
offensive with filth,) came the tapestries, which
were almost as bad; and, while this was the