[Illustration: PLATE IX.--SAMPLER BY E. PHILIPS. DATED 1761. _Author's Collection._ Were it not that this Sampler was produced by little Miss Philips at the tender age of seven, there would be a probability that it was unique through its containing a portrait of the producer. For in no other example have we so many evidences pointing to its being a record of actual facts. For instance, there is clearly shown a gentleman pointing to his wife (in a hooped costume), and having round him his five girls of various ages, the youngest in the care of a nurse. In the upper left corner is his son in charge of a tutor, whilst on the right are two maid-servants, one being a woman of colour. This fashion for black servants is further emphasised by the negro boy with the dog. That these should be present in this family is not remarkable, for by the lower illustration it is evident that Mr Philips was a traveller who had crossed the seas in his ship to where alligators, black swans and other rare birds abounded. The work was executed in 1761, the second year of George the Third, whose monogram and crown are supported by two soldiers in the costume of the period. It has been most dexterously carried out by the young lady, and it is conceived in a delicate harmony of greens and blues which was not uncommon at that time. Size, 19 × 12-1/2. An adaptation of this Sampler has been utilised as the drop scene to the play of "Peter Pan."] But the mistress of a ladies' improving school would hardly like her pupils to copy time after time the same designs--designs which perhaps resembled those of a rival establishment. Such a one would be oblivious to the fact that an ornamentalist is born not made, that the best design is traditional, and that pupils would be far more worthily employed in perpetuating ornamentation which had been invented by races intuitively gifted for such a purpose, than in attempting feeble products of her own brain. So, too, results show that she was, as a rule, unaware that good design is better displayed in simplicity than in pretentiousness. As that authority on design, the late Lewis Day, wrote in his volume on Embroidery, "The combination of a good designer and worker in the same person is an ideal very occasionally to be met with, and any attempt to realise it generally fails." Samplers show in increasing numbers as the end approaches that their designers were ignorant of most of the elementary rules of ornamentation in needlework, such, for instance, as that the pictorial is not a suitable subject for reproduction, nor the delineation of the human figure, nor that the floral and vegetable kingdom, whilst lending itself better than aught else, should be treated from the decorative, and not the realistic point of view. We will now pass on to consider generally the forms of decoration most usually met with. Sampler Design: the Human Figure