The first step toward buying must be a bit of pleasant study which shall serve in the nature of self-defence. Not by books alone, however, shall this subject be approached, but by happy jaunts to sympathetic museums, both at home and abroad, by moments snatched from the touch-and-go talk of afternoon tea in some friend's salon or library, or by strolling visits to dealers. These object lessons supplement the book, as a study of entomology is enlivened by a chase for butterflies in the flowery meads of June, or as botany is made endurable by lying on a bank of violets. All work and no play not only makes Jack a dull boy, but makes dull reading the book he has in hand. The tale of tapestry itself carries us back to the unfathomable East which has a trick at dates, making the Christian Era a modern epoch, and making of us but a newly-sprung civilisation in the history of the old grey world. After showing us that the East pre-empted originality for all time, the history of tapestry lightly lifts us over a few centuries and throws us into the romance of Gothic days, then trails us along through increasing European civilisation up to the great awakening, the Renaissance. Then it loiters in the pleasant ways of the kings of France during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and finally falls upon modern effort, not limited to Europe now, but nesting also in the New World which is especially our own. Tapestry, according to the interpretation of the word used in this book, is a pictured cloth, woven by an artist or a talented craftsman, in which the design is an integral part of the fabric, and not an embroidery stitched on a basic tissue. With this flat statement the review of tapestries from antiquity until our time may be read without fear of mistaking the term. THE LOOM The looms on which tapestries are made are such as have been known as long as the history of man is known, but we have come to call them high-warp and low-warp, or as the French have it, _haute lisse_ and _basse lisse_. In the celebrated periods of weaving the high loom has been the one in use, and to it is accredited a power almost mysterious; yet the work of the two styles of loom are not distinguishable by the weave alone, and it is true that the low-warp looms were used in France when the manufacture of tapestries was permanently established by the Crown about 1600. So difficult is it to determine the work of the two looms that weavers themselves could not distinguish without the aid of a red thread which they at one time wove in the border. Yet because the years of the highest perfection in tapestries have been when the high loom was in vogue, some peculiar power is supposed to reside within it. That the high movements of the fine arts have been contemporary with perfection in tapestries, seems not to be taken into consideration. NECESSARY FRENCH TERMS