days, and bull-fights on Easter Mondays. That of black blonde, trimmed with deep lace, and the mantilla de tiro,' for ordinary wear, made of black silk trimmed with velvet. The black blonde of Spain, however, does not equal that of Chantilly.

Flanders disputes with Italy the glory of the invention of lace. Baron Reiffenberg declares that lace cornettes or caps were worn in that country as early as the fourteenth century. Pillow lace, at all events, was first made in the Low Countries. In a side chapel of the choir of St. Peter's at Louvain is an altar-piece by Quentin Matsys, of the date 1495, in which a girl is making lace with bobbins on a pillow similar to those of the present day. The lace manufacture of Flanders supported itself better amid the horrors of the atrocious religious persecutions of the Duke of Alva than any of the other noted fabrics of the Netherlands-the great cradle of modern industry. Every country in Northern Europe, France with the exception of Alençon, Germany, and England learned the art of lacemaking from Flanders.

For lace let Flanders bear away the belle,'

says Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and the line holds good still amid all the vicissitudes of commerce, and in spite of the close rivalry which now besets it in the Point d'Alençon. The government, however, took fright when the manufacture of Point de France was established by Colbert, and attracted numbers of lace-making emigrants to this country. An Act was passed, dated Brussels, in 1698, threatening with punishment all who should entice the lace-workers across the frontiers.

Brussels lace, from the earliest days of the manufacture of the time, has, like the steel of Toledo, held a foremost reputation among its rivals. It has acquired the name of Point d'Angleterre, but this is a smuggled appellation. In 1662 the English Parliament, alarmed at the sums of money expended on foreign point, and desirous of protecting the English bonelace manufacture, passed an Act prohibiting the importation of foreign lace. But the Court of Charles II., with its Buckinghams, Rochesters, and its fine ladies like Lady Castlemaine, who wore the finest smocks and linen petticoats laced with rich lace at the bottom that ever Pepys saw,' so that it did his heart' good to look at them,' must have its due supply of lace. Therefore the English lace-merchants first tried to set up manufactories of Brussels lace-workers in England; but failing in this through want of the proper flax, they adopted the more simple expedient of buying up the choicest laces of the Brussels mart and then smuggling them over to England and selling them

under

under the false title of 'Point d'Angleterre,' or English point, as though of home manufacture.

Of the rate at which lace was consumed at that day an idea may be formed by the account of the seizure of a smuggling ship with a cargo of 744,953 ells of lace, without reckoning handkerchiefs, collars, fichus, aprons, petticoats, fans, gloves, &c., all of the same material. The title Point de Bruxelles' then went out of fashion altogether, and 'Point d'Angleterre' took its place both in England and France.

The best Brussels lace is made only in Brussels :

:

'The thread used in Brussels lace is of extraordinary fineness. It is made of flax grown at Brabant, at Hal, and Rebecq Rognon. The finest quality is spun in dark underground rooms, for contact with the dry air causes the thread to break; so fine is it as almost to escape the sight. The feel of the thread as it passes through the finger is the surest guide. The thread-spinner closely examines every inch drawn from her distaff; and when any inequality occurs, stops her wheel to repair the mischief. Every artificial help is given to the eye. A background of dark paper is placed to throw out the thread, and the room so arranged as to admit one single ray of light upon the work. The life of a Flemish thread-spinner is unhealthy, and her work requires the greatest skill; her wages are therefore proportionately high.

"It is the fineness of the thread which renders the real Brussels ground called vrai réseau so costly. The difficulty of procuring this fine thread at any cost prevented the art being established in other countries.'

In 1787 Lord Gordon, a Scotch Lord of Session, who was seized with the passion of the day for improving all sorts of British manufactures, writes:

This day I bought you ruffles, and some beautiful Brussels lace, the most light and costly of manufactures. I had entertained, as I now suspect, a vain ambition to attempt the introduction of it into my humble parish in Scotland; but on inquiry I was discouraged. The thread is of so exquisite a fineness they cannot make it in this country. It is brought from Cambray and Valenciennes, in French Flanders; and five or six different artists are employed to form the nice part of this fabric, so that it is a complicated art which cannot be transplanted without a passion as strong as mine for manufactures, and a purse much stronger. At Brussels, from one pound of flax alone they can manufacture to the value of 7001. sterling.'

After this, one may, with Mrs. Palliser, quote Spenser's line'More subtle web Arachne cannot spin.'

There were formerly two kinds of ground in Brussels lace, the

bride and the réseau. 'Angleterre à bride,' however, was discontinued a century back.

Brussels lace had, nevertheless, one great fault-from being so much manipulated in the manufacture by the hands of the workers it acquired a reddish-yellow hue. In order to obviate this defect the workwoman powders the flowers previously to sewing them on with white lead. However, even a taste for discoloured lace was prevalent in the last century, and our grandmothers, when not satisfied as to the richness of discolouration, ' rewashed their lace in coffee.'

The pattern of Brussels lace has always followed the fashion of the day. The most ancient examples of Brussels lace are in the Gothic style of ornament, and changed from this to the flowing artificial style of the last century; after passing_through_the 'genre fleuri,' of the First Empire, the patterns of Brussels lace now follow nature and become every year more truly artistic.

Mechlin lace, however, to which Napoleon compared the spire of Antwerp Cathedral, is the prettiest of laces, as Brussels is the most beautiful. Its distinguishing feature is the flat thread which forms the flower and gives the lace the character of embroidery, hence sometimes called 'broderie de Malines.' The manufacture of it, however, has long been on the decline.

Mechlin is essentially a summer lace, being charming when worn over colour. It was in great favour in the last century. George I. wore Mechlin cravats. Of the beau of 1727, we

read

"Right Macklin must twist round his bosom and wrists.' Swift writes

'Now to another scene give place;

Enter the folks with silk and lace,

Fresh matter for a world of chat,

Right India this, right Macklin that.'

In 'Roderick Random' the fops, naval and military, of the day have their hair powdered with maréchal, and wear cambric shirts with Malines lace dyed with coffee-grounds.'

Lady Wortley Montague writes of an incipient lover

'With eager beat his Mechlin cravat moves,

He loves, I whisper to myself, he loves.'

We pass over the other Flemish towns to arrive at France, which has since the decline of Venice always set the fashion in dress, and now, in the opinion of some, rivals Brussels in lace-manufacture.

After its first period of servile Italian imitation, which lasted

up

up to the time of the last Valois, France boldly struck out a line of fashion of its own, and made one of the most astounding of all human inventions in dress, the ruff or fraise, so called from its fancied resemblance to the caul or frill of a calf. In Ulpian Fullwell's Interlude' (1568), Michael Newfangle says

'I learned to make gowns with long sleeves and wings,
I learned to make ruffs like calves' chitterlings.'

Henry II., who had a scar on his neck, was the first to place this eccentric platform of lace under the chin, which made him and his courtiers, who immediately followed suit, look each like a John the Baptist's head placed on a charger.

Henry III. and his mignons frisés et fraisés' carried the ruff to the extremest point. This woman-fop among monarchs, who dressed himself with such hermaphrodite extravagance that you could not tell of which sex he was, bestowed especial pains on his ruff. He adjusted the plaits with poking-sticks with his own hand. In the Satyre Menippée' he is the Goudronneur des collets de sa femme.'

By 1579 ruffs had grown prodigiously. Ladies, as all know, took to them, and would not be behind the men. It is said of the Reine Margot that, when seated at dinner, she was obliged to have a spoon with a handle two feet long for the purpose of passing her soup over her ruff, and preserving it rigid and immaculate. They were made so stiffened that they cracked like paper. The ruff naturally was a subject for sarcasm and caricature. Thus in 1579 Henry III., in his fraise at the fair of St. Germains, was met by a band of students-as saucy as Paris students have ever been at Carnival times-with immoderate ruffs of paper, and crying out 'A la fraise on connaît le veau.' And these young fellows were sent to prison for their pleasantry.

The history of the ruff may here be completed by an account of its destiny in England. The ruff-the small Spanish ruffappeared round the necks of people in the reign of Philip and Mary, whose effigies on the great seal have ruffs round their necks, and little ruffs or ruffles round their wrists. But the apogee of the ruff was in the days of Queen Elizabeth, whose ruff was of stupendous magnificence. Clear starching' came in most opportunely to the support of the dignity of the ruff. It was imported from Flanders, and Madame Dinghen van der Plasse came over with her husband to London from Flanders for their better safeties,' as Stowe says; that is, to escape from the bonfires of the Duke of Alva, and made a fortune by clearstarching ruffs. She took pupils, and was much patronized by the court dandies of the time; but vulgar people looked on the

lady

lady as something worse than a witch, and called her clear-starch mixture devil's broth.'

The wearer of the ruff was in a state of ceaseless agony lest its fine inflexibility should be broken, and its bewired and starched circumference should have a fall. The Elizabethan fop drew back from all who approached too near, crying

'Not so close, thy breath will draw my ruff.'

The chief utensil for keeping ruffs in order was the 'poking-stick of steel,' which Autolycus had among his wares. By the aid of the poking-stick heated in the fire the folds of the ruffs were ironed into the precise symmetry which was the glory of the Elizabethan exquisite. Their use began about 1576, according to Stowe, and in the accounts of Elizabeth we find she paid in 1592 to her blacksmith, one Thomas Larkin, pro 2 de lez setting sticks ad 2s. 6d.,' the sum of 5s. Under the fostering care of starch and poking-sticks the ruff shot out to the length of 'a quarter of a yard.' This vast structure of gauze was called in England the French ruff,' while the French retaliated and called it the English monster.'

Queen Elizabeth, who had a yellow throat, wore the highest and stiffest ruff in Europe, with the exception of the Queen of Navarre. Her ruffs were made of the finest cut-work, enriched with gold, silver, and even precious stones. She used up endless yards of cut-work, purle, needlework lace, bone lace of gold, of silver, enriched with pearls, and bugles and spangles, in the fabrication of her three-piled ruff.' But she sternly refused such license to her people, as is well known, by ordering grave citizens to stand at the gates of the city and lay hands on the wearers of all ruffs beyond a certain length, in order to cut them down to dimensions decent in a subject.

The ruff, after a little knocking about, or after exposure to a little rain or wind, became a pitiable object. Philip Stubbs, in his Anatomy of Abuses,' says, 'If olus with his blasts, or Neptune with his storms, chance to hit upon the crazie bark of their bruised ruffes, then they goe flip flap in the wind like ragges that flew abroad, lying on their shoulders like the dishclout of a slut. But wot ye what? the devill as he in the fulness of his malice first invented these great ruffes, &c.'

To return to France. The ruff gave place, in the men, to the 'rabat,' the 'col rabattu,' or turn-down collar of lace, while the ladies took to the vast collerette,' to be seen in the pictures of Rubens rising like a gigantic fan or amphitheatre behind the head of Marie de Medicis. To make amends, however, for the diminution of lace in their neck investments, men fringed the tops of their boots and