How did he happen upon it in these latter days? By worshipping the old hangings of the Gothic perfection, by finding the very soul of them, of their designers and of their craftsmen; then, letting that soul enter his, he set his fingers reverently to work to learn, as well, the secret of the ancient workman. It was as early as 1885 that he began; was cartoonist, dyer, tapissier, all, for the experiment, which was a small square of verdure after the manner of the Gothic, curling big acanthus leaves about a softened rose, a mingling of greens of ocean and shady reds. Perhaps it was no great matter in the way of tapestry, but it was to Morris like the discovery of a new continent to the navigator. His was the time of a so-called aesthetic school in England. Watts, Rossetti and Burne-Jones were harking back to antiquity for inspiration. Morris associated with him the latter, who drew wondrous figures of maids and men and angels, figures filled with the devout spirit of the time when religion was paramount, and perfect with the art of to-day. The romance of _The Holy Grail_ gave happy theme for the work, and three beautiful tapestries made the set. _The Adoration of the Magi_ was another, made for Exeter College, Oxford. Sir Edward Burne-Jones designed all these wondrous pictures, and the wisdom of Morris decreed that the _Grail_ series should not be oft repeated. The first figure tapestry woven on the looms was a fancy drawn by Walter Crane, called _The Goose Girl_. [Illustration: TRUTH BLINDFOLDED Merton Abbey Tapestry. Byram Shaw, Artist] The most enchantingly mediaeval and most modernly perfect piece is by Burne-Jones, called _David Instructing Solomon in the Building of the Temple_. (Plate facing page 257.) In this the time of Gothic beauty lives again. Planes are repeated, figures are massed, detail is clear and impressive, yet modern laws of drawing concentrate the interest on the central action as strongly as though all else were subservient. _The Passing of Venus_ was Burne-Jones' last cartoon for Merton Abbey looms. (Plate facing page 260.) Although a critique of the art of this great painter would be out of place in a book on the applied arts, at least it is allowable to express the conviction that more beautiful, more fitting designs for tapestry it would be difficult to imagine. Modern work of this sort has produced nothing that approaches them, preserving as they do the sincerity and reverence of a simple people, the ideality of a conscientious age, yet softening all technical faults with modern finish. An unhappy fact is that this tapestry, which was considered by the Merton Abbey works as its _chef d'oeuvre_, was destroyed by fire in the Brussels Exhibition of 1910.