As early as A.D. 1277 Exeter Cathedral reckoned among her vestments several such; for instance, a cope of baudekin figured with small two-headed eagles: “Capa baudekyn cum parvis aquilis, ij capita habentibus;”[221] and our Henry III.’s brother, Richard the king of Germany, gave to the same church a cope of black baudekin, with eagles in gold figured on it: “Una capa de baudek, nigra cum aquilis deauratis.”[222] Many other instances might be noticed all through England. [216] Asserius, De Rebus Gestis Ælfredi, ed. Wise, p. 33. [217] Will. Malmes. Gesta Regum Anglorum, t. ii. p. 415, ed. Duffus Hardy. [218] Plates, 18, 20, 22. [219] Quintus Curtius, Lib. III. cap. iii. p. 7. [220] Ibid. Lib. IV. cap. xv. p. 72. [221] Oliver, p. 299. [222] Ibid. As in architecture, sculpture, and painting, ancient and modern, so IN WOVEN STUFFS THERE ARE STYLES NICELY DEFINED, AND EPOCHS EASILY DISCERNIBLE. Hitherto no attempt has been anywhere made to distribute olden silken textiles into various schools, and as the present is the first and only collection which has in any country been thrown open as yet to the public, the occasion seems a fitting one to warrant such an endeavour of classification. With no other than the specimens here before us, we think we see them fall into these several groups--Chinese, Persian, Byzantine, Oriental or Indian, Syrian, Saracenic, Moresco-Spanish, Sicilian, Italian, Flemish, British, and French. _Chinese_ examples here are very few; but what they are, whether plain or figured, they are beautiful in their own way. From all that we know of the people, we are led to believe their own way two thousand years ago is precisely theirs still, so that the web wrought by them this year or two hundred years ago, like No. 1368, p. 75, would not differ hardly in a line from their textiles two thousand years gone by, when 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 the stuffs, warp and woof are of silk, and both of the best kinds. _Persian_ textiles, even as we see them in this collection, must have been for many centuries just as they were ever figured, and may be, even now, described by the words of Quintus Curtius, with some little allowance for those influences exercised upon the mind of the weaver by his peculiar religious belief, which would not let the lowliest workman forget the “homa,” or tree of life. When Marco Polo travelled through those parts, in the thirteenth century, and our countryman, Sir John Mandeville, a hundred years later, the old love for hunting wild beasts still lived, and the princes of the country were as fond as ever of training the cheetah, a kind of small lion or leopard, for the chase, as we have noticed, p. 178.