"Flowers, Plants and Fishes, Beasts, Birds, Flyes and Bees, Hills, Dales, Plains, Pastures, Skies, Seas, Rivers, Trees, There's nothing ne'er at hand or farthest sought But with the needle may be shap'd and wrought." It would seem from the foregoing that the volumes would be of more profit to the worker of embroidered pictures than to sampler-makers, and this was no doubt the case; for when the former went out of fashion, the books dealing with the subject disappeared too, and nothing further of any note was published, except in the beginning of the last century, when the National Schools were furnished with manuals which dealt more with plain sewing than with decorative needlework. The Last of the Samplers I can hardly close my remarks upon the entertaining subject, the elucidation of and material for which has filled many spare hours, without a word of regret at having to pen the elegy of the sampler. It may be said that even so long ago as the era of the _Spectator_ there were those who sounded its death knell, and who considered that the days when a lady crowded a thousand graces on to the surface of a garter were gone for ever. For did it not go to the heart of one of Mr Spectator's correspondents to see a couple of idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon, in a room hung round with the industry of their great-grandmothers, and did he not implore that potentate to take the laudable mystery of embroidery into his serious consideration? But even then there were matrons who upheld the craft, and of whom an epitaph could be written that "she wrought the whole Bible in tapestry, and died in a good old age after having covered three hundred yards of wall in the Mansion House." Besides, the samplers themselves show that the industry, if not the Art, continued all through that century and for at least half of the nineteenth. The decadence of the sampler has never been more tenderly or pathetically dealt with than in the description given of the dame's school in the sketch entitled "Lucy," in Miss Mitford's "Our Village."[9]