As is set forth, in the “Church of Our Fathers,”[464] some thirty years ago there began to grow up, amid a few, a strong desire to behold a better taste in the building of churches, and the design of every ecclesiastical accessory. Our common sympathies on all these points brought together the late Mr. A. Welby Pugin, and him who writes these lines, and they became warm friends. What were the results to Pugin through our intercourse he himself has acknowledged in his “Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture,” p. 67. To think of anything and do it, were, with Pugin, two consecutive actions which followed one another speedily. While at Birmingham Hardman was working in metal, after drawings by Pugin, and putting together a stained-glass window from one of his cartoons, a loom at Manchester, which had been geared after his idea, was throwing off textiles for church use, and orphreys, broad and narrow, were being wove in London: the mediæval court at Hyde Park, in the year 1851, was the gem of our first Exhibition. Going back, a German lady took from England a cope made of the textiles that had been designed by Pugin. This vestment got into the hands of Dr. Bock, whose feelings were, as they still are, akin to our own in a love for all the beauties of the mediæval period. While so glad of his new gift, it set this worthy canon of Aix-la-Chapelle thinking that other and better patterns were to be seen upon stuffs of an old and good period, could they be but found. He gave himself to the search, and took along with him, over the length and breadth of Europe, that energy and speed for which he is so conspicuous; and the gatherings from his many journeys, put together, made up the bulk of a most curious and valuable collection--the only one of its kind--which has found an abiding home in England, at the South Kensington Museum. Thus have these beautiful art-works of the loom become, after a manner, a recompense most gratefully received, to the native land of those men whose action, some thirty years ago, indirectly originated their being brought together. Before laying down his pen, the writer of this Catalogue must put on record his grateful remembrances of the kindness shown so readily by M. Octave Delepierre, Secretary of Legation and Consul-General for Belgium, in rendering those inscriptions of old German upon that curious piece of hanging, No. 1297, p. 296, as well as upon another piece of the same kind, No. 1465, p. 298. For the like help afforded about the same, together with those several long inscriptions upon No. 4456, p. 92, the writer is equally indebted to Dr. Appell; and, without the ready courtesy of the Rev. Eugene Popoff, the writer could not have been able to have given the Greek readings, hidden under Cyrillian characters, worked by the needle all around the Ruthenic Sindon, No. 8278, p. 170. 17, Essex Villas, Kensington. [464] T. i. pp. 348, &c. [Illustration] [Illustration] A DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE