Of this particularly glorious art, which has become more completely a lost art than any other ever revealed to man, there is little in the region under consideration. It did not issue from the Heart of Europe, but had its beginnings elsewhere and its culmination as well. It was an art of the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, degenerating rapidly after the year 1300, and, while the churches and abbeys and cathedrals between the Seine and the Somme were once splendid with glass that almost rivalled that of Chartres, the Reformation and the Revolution had seen to it that the major part of this glory had been made to depart. Amiens retains a little in its chevet chapels, and Reims only a year ago was blazing with an apocalyptic splendour that is now transformed into gaping and fire-swept openings, laced by distorted metal bars, and heaps of pulverised refuse ground into the blood and ashes on shattered pavements. Whatever the Low Countries may have had is long since gone the way of all the other beautiful things the Calvinists did not like and only fragments, imitations, and Renaissance absurdities remain. With the other great art, that of tapestry, the case is fortunately different. This was almost the intimate art of the Heart of Europe, finding its beginnings in Aix when the Greek princess brought with her from the East the first examples of Byzantine needlework and weaving that had been seen in the West in her day, and going on to new glories in Arras, Brussels, Tournai, Audenaarde, Lille, Enghien. The perfection of tapestry weaving came in the last half of the fifteenth century, but the advance was regular for a century before, and if we can judge from the few examples left the work of the fourteenth century had many fine and powerful qualities that were all its own. The collapse came suddenly, early in the sixteenth century, being marked by Raphael’s intrusion into a field where he had no place, and after this there was no more hope for tapestry than for the other arts, and it rapidly sank to the point where the products of the Gobelins, Beauvais, and Aubussons looms were much admired.