Lace has paid for its success in a disputed birthplace, for both Flanders and Italy claim its first manufacture, the experts declaring in favour of the latter, and asserting that Italy bore the art to Spain and passed it on to Flanders. In any case Venice must be granted the first prize for the beauty of its lace, which in early days was enriched with gold and silver. Caen is accorded the honour of having first introduced blonde lace, while France and Switzerland and Belgium have all contributed their share towards the perfecting of "the most fascinating of all fabrics," and different events of history have brought no small influence to bear on the popularity of different laces in different periods, the foreign-made bone-lace obtaining the distinction of being banished from England by royal order. In the reigns of the Stuarts, lace adorned alike feminine and masculine attire, and the collar of the luckless King Charles I. in his many pictures by Vandyke has stamped the fact indelibly on our minds. The Commonwealth greatly affected the manufacture of lace in England, though some of the most rigid Puritans continued to wear Flanders lace, and the dead body of the Protector was "robed in purple velvet, ermine, and richest Flanders lace"--not so bad for the simple cerements of the greatest socialist who ever lived! The passion for wearing lace reached its height in England in the reign of William and Mary, when lace was indispensable to the most exalted wearers of the commodes, and its influence was essential on the full cravats and ruffles. In the reigns of George I. and George II., Brussels lace grew especially popular; but English lace reached a pitch of perfection at this period, Devonshire being especially famous for the industry. In its delicate meshes lace has held captive to its charms many earnest students who have set down its biography in various volumes, and to skim these hurriedly is to do them wrong; so in passing I would recommend their pages to the leisured, while chronicling that we have known lace needle-run or pillow-made for nearly four centuries, and that it was preceded by the "cut out," the _appliqué_, and an embroidery worked in stiffly conventional design on net with cords of thread. The most faithful and punctilious archæologists confess that the origin of the corset must be written down to the credit or discredit of man, for they find the birth of its existence may be dated in the far antiquity, when the savage made his hunting belt of leather stiffened with bone or hard stick held with a thong of hide, and as decorative as useful, since it was adorned with shells and quills and served to hold the knife or quiver.