The gilding of fine silk and canvas in imitation of cloth of gold, like our gilding of wood and other substances, was also sometimes resorted to for splendour’s sake on temporary occasions; such, for instance, as some stately procession or a solemn burial service. Mr. Raine tells us he found in a grave at Durham, among other textiles, “a robe of thinnish silk; the ground colour of the whole is amber; and the ornamental parts were literally covered with _leaf gold_, of which there remained distinct and very numerous portions.” In the churchyard of Cheam, Surrey, in 1865, the skeleton of a priest was found who had been buried some time during the fourteenth century; around the waist was a flat girdle made of brown silk that had been gilt. In the ‘Romaunt of the rose’ translated by Chaucer, dame Gladnesse is thus described:-- --in an over gilt samite Clad she was; and on a piece of German orphrey-web, in the South Kensington collection, no. 1373, and probably made at Cologne in the sixteenth century, the gold is laid by the gilding process. Silver also, as well as gold, was hammered out into very thin sheets which were cut into narrow long shreds to be woven, unmixed with anything else, into a web for garments. Of this we have a striking illustration in the Acts of the apostles, where St. Luke, speaking of Herod Agrippa, says that he presented himself to the people arrayed in kingly apparel, who, to flatter him, shouted that his was the voice not of a man but of a god; and forthwith he was smitten by a loathsome disease which shortly killed him. This royal robe, as Josephus informs us, was a tunic made of silver and wonderful in its texture.