Very often in our old country houses are found, thrown aside in some antique chest, certain small square pieces of nice embroidery, the former use for which nobody now knows, and about which one is asked. If their owners would look at those several cradle-quilts here--pp. 4, 13, 66, 67, 100, 103, 104, 110--they might find out such ancient household stuff was wrought for their forefathers’ comfort and adornment, when mere babies. The evangelists’ emblems figured on several among these coverlets: such as No. 1344, p. 67, No. 4459, p. 100, No. 4644, p. 103, will call to mind those old nursery-rhymes we referred to at p. 103. Of yore, not only little children, but grown-up, ay, aged men too loved to think about those verses, when they went to sleep, for the inventory of furniture taken, A.D. 1446, in the Priory of Durham, tells us that in the upper chamber there was a bed-quilt embroidered with the four Evangelists--one in each corner: “j culcitrum cum iiij or Evangelistis in corneriis.”[398] The bag or purse, No. 8313, p. 188, is of a kind which not only were used for those liturgical purposes which we have already enumerated, but served for private devotional practices. In that very interesting will made by Henry, Lord de Scrope, A.D. 1415, among other pious bequests, is the following one, of the little bag having in it a piece of our Lord’s cross, which he always wore about his neck;--“j bursa parva quæ semper pendet circa collum meum cum cruce Domini.”[399] [395] Leland’s Collectanea, t. iv. pp. 205, 180, 181, 183. [396] Act iii. scene iii. [397] Bury Wills, &c. p. 186. [398] Hist. Dunelm. Scriptores Tres, ed. Surtees Society, p. cclxxxvii. [399] Rymer’s Fœdera, t. ix. p. 278. The crimson velvet mitre,--No. 4015, p. 85,--for the boy-bishop, bairn-bishop, or Nicholas-tide bishop, as the little boy was severally called in England, is a liturgical curiosity, as the ceremonies in which it was formerly worn are everywhere laid aside. Among the things given for the use of the chapel in the college--All Souls--of his founding at Oxford by Archbishop Chicheley, are a cope and mitre for this boy, there named the Nicholas-tide bishope:--“i cap. et mitre pro episcopo Nicholao.”[400] To make good his election to such a dignity, at Eton College, a boy had to study hard and show at the examination for it, that he was the ablest there at his books: his success almost ennobled him among his schoolfellows:--“In die Sti Hugonis pontificis” (17 Nov.) “solebat Ætonæ fieri electio Episcopi Nihilensis, sed consuetudo obsolevit. Olim episcopus ille puerorum habebatur nobilis, in cujus electione, et literata et laudatissima exercitatio, ad ingeniorum vires et motos exercendos, Ætonæ celebris erat.”[401] The colour, crimson, in this boy’s mitre, was to distinguish it from that of bishops.