[Illustration: Ladies carding and spinning; from MSS. of the fourteenth century, in the British museum.] CHAPTER VI. Hitherto no attempt has been made to distribute olden silken textiles into various schools; but the numerous specimens in the admirable collection at South Kensington enable us to separate them into several groups--Chinese, Persian, Byzantine, Indian, Syrian, Saracenic, Moresco-Spanish, Sicilian, Italian, Flemish, British, and French. We shall now especially refer to that collection. The Chinese examples are not many: but, whether plain or figured, they are beautiful in their own way. From all that we know of the people, we are led to believe that their style two thousand years ago is the same still; so that the web wrought by them this year or three hundred years ago, like no. 1368, would differ hardly in a line from their far earlier textiles; of which Dionysius Periegetes wrote that “the Seres make precious figured garments, resembling in colour the flowers of the field, and rivalling in fineness the work of spiders.” In these stuffs, warp and woof are of silk and both of the best kinds. Persian textiles, as we see them at South Kensington, must also have been for many centuries very much the same in design and character. Sometimes the design is made up of various kinds of beasts and birds, real or imaginary, with the sporting cheetah spotted among them; and the “homa” or tree of life conspicuously set above all. In such cases we may conclude that the web was wrought by Persians, and generally the textile will be found in all its parts to be of the richest materials. No. 8233, may be referred to as an illustration of the Persian type. A school of design sprung up among the Byzantine Greeks, from the time when in the sixth century they began to weave home-grown silk, which retained not a little of the beauty, breadth, and flowing outline of ancient art. Together with this, a strong feeling of Christianity showed itself as well in many of the subjects which they took out of holy writ as in the smaller elements of ornamentation. Figures, whether of the human form or of beasts, are given in a much larger and bolder size than on any other ancient stuffs. Though there are not many known specimens from the old looms of Constantinople there is one, no. 7036, showing Samson wrestling with a lion, which may serve as a type. In the year 1295 St. Paul’s cathedral would seem to have possessed several vestments made of Byzantine silk. A very splendid dalmatic of Byzantine silk, probably of the twelfth century, is preserved in the treasury of St. Peter’s at Rome. The colour is dark blue, and the embroidery in gold and colours. The specimens at South Kensington from the Byzantine and later Greek loom are not to be taken as by any means first-rate examples of its general production. They are poor both in material and, when figured, in design. There are, however, many pieces: nos. 1241, 1246, 1257, 1266, etc.