“I went yesterday with two companions for a look at your Bayeux Tapestry in the Albert Hall and I cannot but express to you at once my very great contentment with what I saw there. The enterprise was itself a solid, useful and creditable thing; and the execution of it seems to me a perfect success far exceeding all the expectations I have entertained about it. Mr. Froude, who was one of my companions, was full of admiration, and a brother of mine who had seen the Tapestry itself at Bayeux last year seemed to think that this copy you had managed to make (I hope in a permanent and easily repeatable manner) was superior in vivid clearness, beauty of colour, etc., to the very original. As the work is in essence photographic, I flatter myself you have preserved the negative and other apparatus whereby the thing can be repeated as often as you like and at a moderate expense--in which case it might with evident and great advantage be imparted in the same complete form to all British Colonies, and even in America itself would be precious to every inquiring and every cultivated mind. In a word, I am much obliged to you for sending me to see this feat of yours (by far the reasonablest in completeness of its kind yet known to me), and very much obliged above all for your having done it and _so_ done it. “Yours truly, with many thanks, “T. CARLYLE.” VI.--NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS. PLATE I. King Edward gives instruction to two persons, of whom one is Harold; Edward’s clothes are richly embroidered. He is seated on a throne and has a crown and sceptre. The scene shows a room in Edward’s castle; a portion of the outside wall is given; but the rest is cut away to give a view of the interior in a manner very common in mediæval art. It will be seen that the castle is in the Norman style. On the left is a round Norman window and there are Norman turrets above. The throne on which Edward is sitting is typical of the art of the period, the animal’s head which forms the right arm being a common decoration. In an Anglo-Saxon calendar of the 11th century (the MS. Cotton and Julius A VI.) a drinking party is shown on a large daïs, the two ends of which are in form like the head and front legs of two great dogs. As to the nature of the communications passing between Edward the Confessor and Harold, it may be added that three reasons are given of Harold’s journey to Normandy in different versions: (1) To release his brother and nephew from imprisonment; (2) that, owing to a storm when out fishing, he was shipwrecked on the coast of France; (3) to impart to William Edward’s intention of making him his heir. The third was the Norman method of explaining what happened and is apparently the one accepted by the designer of the Tapestry. PLATE II. Harold’s Oath.