_Genoa_, though in far off mediæval times not so conspicuous as she afterwards became for her textile industry, still must have from a remote period, encouraged within her walls, and over her narrow territory, the weaving of silken webs. Of these the earliest mention we anywhere find, is to be seen in the inventory of those costly vestments once belonging to our own St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in the year 1295: besides a cope of Genoa cloth, that church had, from the same place, a hanging patterned with wheels and two-headed birds.[230] Though this first description be scant, we read in it quite enough to gather that these Genoese cloths must have entirely resembled the textiles wrought at Lucca, but, in particular, in Sicily. Perhaps they had been carried by trade from Palermo to the north-west shores of Italy, whence they were brought in the same way to England, so that they may be deemed to have reached us not so much from the looms themselves of Genoa, as those of some other place, but through her then great port. Of Genoa’s own weaving of beautiful velvets there can be no doubt, a reputation she keeps to the present day as far as plain velvet is concerned. In this collection we have samples in every kind of Genoese velvets, from those with a smooth unbroken surface to the elaborately patterned ones--art-wrought velvets in fact--showing, together with wonderful skill in the weaving, much beauty of design. Among the plain velvets in which we have nothing but great softness and depth of pile, along with clear bright luminous tones of colour, No. 540, p. 3, is a very fair specimen for its delicious richness of pile; and No. 8334, p. 199, not merely for this property, but as well for its lightsome mellow deep tint of crimson. Getting to what may be truly called art-velvets, we come to several specimens here. Some are raised or cut, the design being done in a pile standing well up by itself from out of a flat ground of silk, sometimes of the same, sometimes of another colour, and not unfrequently wrought in gold, as at pp. 18, 90, 107, 110, 263. Then we have at No. 7795, p. 145, an example of that precious kind--velvet upon velvet--in which the ground is velvet, and again of velvet is the pattern itself, but raised one pile higher and well above the other, so as to show its form and shape distinctly. Last of all we here find samples, as in No. 8323, p. 192, how the design was done in various coloured velvet. Such was a favourite in England, and called motley; in his will, A.D. 1415, Henry Lord Scrope bequeathed two vestments, one, motley velvet rubeo de auro; the other, motley velvet nigro, rubeo et viridi, &c.[231] [229] Archæologia, t. xxvi. pp. 337, 344. [230] Hist. of St. Paul’s, ed. Dugdale, pp. 318, 329. [231] Rymer’s Fœdera, t. 9, p. 274.