were taken down by order of the Duke some time ago and sent to South Kensington, where, under the direction of the skilled and zealous officials of the Board of Education, they have been sorted and put together. It appears that the fragments make up into a homogeneous set of four hangings, of which the first now restored in its entirety, is here reproduced (Plate X).1

The subject is a hunting scene, or rather a series of pictures of the chase. On the right is a bear-hunt in which a group of strangers from the East are taking an active part. One, turbaned and barefooted, emerges from behind a rock riding a camel. He carries the jarid or long dart-Byron's "hurled on high jerreed "—still common in Persia, and as the Arabic name implies, originally made out of a palm branch stripped of its leaves. The same accuracy appears in the detail of costume, and is difficult to account for, unless we suppose that the artist had some genuine Eastern miniature before him. Lower down a bear is being assailed on all sides vi et armis. The women, one of whom has provided herself with a large lapful of huge stones, seem no less forward and eager than the men. In the centre of the composition there rises a castle, which, with moat and drawbridge, it has evidently puzzled the draughtsman to build. Some boys have been playing on the bank of the moat, and one of them has fallen in, and is being attacked by swans, while a woman tries from the bank to scare the angry birds with a stick. The left is taken up by an otter hunt. The animal is being hoisted up out of the water on a three-pronged spear or trident, while the horn sounds morte. Behind the castle boys rob a heron's nest in a tree, and a girl presents on her knees a specimen of the long-legged brood to a grave personage and his lady in gold chains and elaborate head-dresses. In the distance we have a broken coast line and the sea. A boat, with what looks like a person of quality seated under a canopy in the stern, rows towards a ship lying at anchor, while from the masthead of another ship there floats the cross of St. George. Finally, of the artist it cannot be said that "hunting he

1 [Since the above was written the second of these tapestries has also been restored; both now hang in the Sculpture Gallery at Chatsworth. The two last tapestries of the series are in process of restoration. Each panel measures about 14 ft. by 37 ft.]

2 [It must be noted, however, that the field is bright yellow instead of the white one of St. George (“Art Workers' Quarterly," July, 1902, p. 80).]

loved, but love he laughed to scorn," for stately groups of knights and dames stroll up and down and look on at the hurry and excitement of the scene in the intervals of their amiable converse.

The costume points to the latter end of the fifteenth century as the probable date of this imposing piece; but the question of its origin reminds us that so far we have no sure sense even of what we have a right to expect on English ground. Such work is usually called Flemish; but the type of the Flemish craftsmen was grave and ascetic, and they were more at home in the clouds of allegory than on terra firma. The bear has been appealed to, as a sign that the tapestry must have been worked out of England, probably in France; but this argument, if it proves anything, proves too much, for camels are no more found in France than bears in England, and if a camel can get into the composition by pictorial license, a bear might get in on the same terms. The subject is far too difficult and obscure for the random experiments of Italian picture-fancying; but one may go so far as to point out that there is something in the open-air vigour and zest of the scene that breathes the insular spirit of English miniatures, and contrasts sharply with the tone of asceticism and seriousness that pervades the contemporary work of Brussels and Bruges. There is nothing to suggest that the artist is dependent for his images on some illustrated treatise on Venery; on the contrary, it is more as if he were reproducing with the care and zeal of an enthusiast some of his own adventures sub Jove frigido. Moreover, the very defects of the work stamp it as homemade. The Flemish craftsmen were further advanced in the art of perspective. They would not have appeared so helplessly at sea with the problem of setting the castle in something like a plausible relation to the landscape and the figures. The costume points to about the middle of the fifteenth century, and there is much both in the style and in the spirit of the piece that reminds one of English miniature art; while to Flemish work of this kind it stands, generally speaking, in the same relation as English to Flemish glass.'

1 Certain details (such as the inscription monte le désir on the gown of a lady in the second tapestry, and the device of "a cloud with a shower of raindrops or tears" upon the sleeves of some of the men), together with the presence f the Oriental huntsmen in the first panel, seem to prove that the episodes depicted belong to the Court of King Réné of Anjou. See the second article by W. G. Thompson, in "Art Workers' Quarterly," June, 1904, where it is further

Unfortunately there are no documents to show how the tapestry came into the possession of the Cavendish family; but it seems clear that it belonged to the original furniture of Hardwick Hall. The Countess was herself an expert and industrious needlewoman, and intolerant of idleness even in the Queen of Scots; but her taste lay in the direction of allegory and Bible history, as we can see in the Minstrels' Gallery at Hardwick, where there still hangs a panel representing the sacrifice of Isaac, with the Countess herself looking on, starched and stiff, in her Elizabethan finery. This may explain, if it does not excuse, the scant respect with which she treated a mere hunting scene with no strain of allegory or tendency to edification.

Still, however this may be, the tapestry now recovered and restored will last as an appropriate monument of the lady of whom Walpole, after his first visit to Hardwick, wrote:

Four times the nuptial bed she warm'd,

And every time so well perform'd,

That when Death spoil'd each Husband's billing,

He left the Widow ev'ry Shilling.

Sad was the Dame, but not dejected;

Five stately Mansions she erected

With more than royal pomp, to vary

The prison of her captive, Mary.

When Hardwicke's towr's shall bow their head,

Nor Mass be more in Worksop said,

When Bolsover's fair frame shall tend,

Like Old-Coates, to its mould'ring end,

When Chatsworth knows no Ca'ndish bounties,

Let Fame forget this costly Countess.

Unlike the emancipated woman of a later time who begins by forgetting what her grandmother knew, she ran with the hare and hunted with the hounds. She faced with manlike grip and vision the risks of public life at a time when the charge of a pretender like Mary and an heiress like Arbella was no sinecure; but she minded her needle and her account books all the same.

suggested that the four panels were probably woven to commemorate the marriage of Margaret of Anjou with Henry VI of England in 1444.