"And soth to faine my chambre was Ful wel depainted---- And all the wals with colours fine Were painted bothe texte and glose, And all the Romaunt of the Rose." And again:-- "But when I woke all was ypast, For ther nas lady ne creture, Save on the wals old portraiture Of horsemen, hawkis, and houndis, And hurt dere all ful of woundis." Often emblematical devices were painted, which gave the artist opportunity to display his fancy and exercise his wit. Dr. Cullum, in his History of Hawsted, gives an account of an old mansion, having a closet, the panels of which were painted with various sentences, emblems, and mottos. One of these, intended doubtless as a hint to female vanity, is a painter, who having begun to sketch out a female portrait, writes "Dic mihi qualis eris." But comfort, or at least a degree of comfort, had progressed hand in hand with decoration. Tapestry, that is to say needlework tapestry, which, like the Bayeux tapestry of Matilda, had been used solely for the decoration of altars, or the embellishment of other parts of sacred edifices on occasions of festival, or the performance of solemn rites, had been of much more general application amongst the luxurious inhabitants of the South, and was introduced into England as furniture hanging by Eleanor of Castile. In Chaucer's time it was common. Among his pilgrims to Canterbury is a tapestry worker who is mentioned in the Prologue, in common with other "professors." "An haberdasher and a carpenter, A webbe, a dyer, and a tapiser." And, again:-- "I wol give him all that falles To his chambre and to his halles, I will do painte him with pure golde, And _tapite_ hem ful many a folde." These modes of decorating the walls and chambers with paintings, and with tapestry, were indeed contemporaneous; though the greater difficulty of obtaining the latter--for as it was not made at Arras until the fourteenth century, all that we here refer to is the painful product of the needle alone--many have made it less usual and common than the former. Pithy sentences, and metrical stanzas were often wrought in tapestry: in Wresil Castle and other mansions, some of the apartments were adorned in the Oriental manner with metrical descriptions called Proverbs. And Warton mentions an ancient suit of tapestry, containing Ariosto's Orlando, and Angelica, where, at every group, the story was all along illustrated with short lines in Provencal or old French. It could only be from its superior comfort that an article so tedious in manufacture as needlework tapestry could be preferred to the more quickly-produced decorations of the pencil; it was also rude in design; and the following description of some tapestry in an old Manor House in King John's time, though taken from a work of fiction, probably presents a correct picture of the style of most of the pieces exhibited in the mansions of the middle ranks at that period.