The sixteenth-century Italian pattern books are mainly concerned with designs for lace of the first group as distinct from embroidery on linen or net. The period of the second group is established by the laces one finds represented in paintings by such painters as Vandyck, Rembrandt, Gonzales Coques, Mignard, and Hyacinthe Rigaud, whilst the generality of the designs in the third group is safely attributable to designers employed towards the end of the seventeenth century, and during the eighteenth by the Royal or State subsidised manufactories of France, about which several local records, quoted by Mademoiselle Despierre in her book on the Points d'Alençon, are particularly interesting. Laces of rather indeterminate design, such as those which we call peasant laces, have, as a rule, a quaint treatment of pattern, the origin of which is, I think, almost invariably to be referred to some carefully designed prototype; but the charm of such peasant laces lies chiefly in the goodness of their texture combined with a distortion of forms, which arises from the workers' naïveté in misunderstanding the parent design. The really valuable work was that of sympathetic and skilled workers, done directly from well-designed patterns. Now the origin of needle-point and bobbin-made laces is, I think, Occidental, or European, and not Oriental; and the three broadly indicated pattern groups are accompanied by three equally recognisable sorts of texture. The first of them is comparatively stiff and wiry; the second more lissom and inclined to tapiness; and the third, still more lissom, becoming gauzy and filmy in quality. Delicate, filmy laces, common to the eighteenth century, could not, therefore, I think, have been dreamt of in the sixteenth century; neither at that time was there a conception of the tapey, and at times linen-like, laces made in the early part and middle of the seventeenth century. Hence we seem able to rely upon an apparent procession of design types, running concurrently with an equally apparent procession of qualities of texture. By keeping in mind these combined successions of pattern and texture one is enabled not only to classify laces, but also to account for later survivals of old types, as well as for the approximate dates when old and new types severally have arisen.