Dear Mrs. Pollen,—Having examined the admirable photographs to your lace collection, and the letterpress which you have written to accompany them, with a view to meet your wish that I should make revisions and suchlike where I thought necessary, please allow me in the first place to thank you for having entrusted me with what has been a very congenial work, and to say that I really have but few suggestions to offer. Such as they are, they amount to little more than amplifying, and slightly modifying here and there, what you have written.

Your glossary of terms used in describing lace and cognate work is very full, and contains several Italian terms which strike me as being unquestionably of technical value in supplementing information put forward in the best English works on lace-making.

Upon the introductory part of your attractive letterpress you also asked me to freely express an opinion, giving it such a shape as to make it suitable for use as a preface to your work. I now do this with considerable diffidence, notwithstanding that during a good many years I have had a large number of specimens of lace before me, including probably some of the finest ever made. You had the initial advantage of inheriting lace of incontestable origin and antiquity, and also of finding specimens in different countries where facts and traditions of their manufacture could be ascertained on the spot.

For so long a period as that from, say, the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, men derived as much satisfaction in acquiring and wearing laces as women then did. But autres temps, autres moeurs, and closely as our sex may at one time have run yours in the appreciation of lace, yours has outstripped and beaten ours. This, of course, is as it should be, for skill in all forms of needlework and dainty thread-work has practically been the monopoly of women from the time of Penelope forwards, notwithstanding the strict observance of the rule laid down by St. Benedict that the members of his Order should be expert in the use of both pen and needle (as they were for centuries); or the records of the seventeenth century, that boys attended lace-making schools in Devonshire, and that English tailors and labouring men often made good saleable lace in their leisure time during the eighteenth century.

With your suggestion that many sorts of white thread ornamental work, from which a development of needle-made and bobbin-made laces can be traced, are of earlier date than the sixteenth century, I entirely agree; and in corroboration of this, various public collections, within comparatively recent times, have secured from disused ancient Coptic cemeteries in Egypt fragments of elaborate nettings and Saracenic examples of that kind of work which you identify with the Italian "Sfilatura" and "punto a stuora." This last-named stitch is virtually the stitch used in tapestry-making, and it often appears on a small scale in intricate, drawn and whipped thread Persian linen embroidery, the practice of which is assuredly of great age. These methods of stitching for ornamental purposes appear to have been well known in countries coming at some time or another under the direct influence of Saracenic embroiderers; but it is interesting to note they are not identical in character with that of buttonhole stitching, which plays so important a part in lace-making.

The essential feature of the fabric now recognised as lace lies in its being wrought independently of any visible foundation such as linen or net; it is essentially a textile ornamentation depending upon special design, which can be rendered, so far as needle-point lace is concerned, by variations of the buttonhole stitch—the "punto a festone" in Italy, and "point nouÉ" in France—which is distinctively a looping, and not a whipping or weaving, stitch; and so far as bobbin-made lace is concerned, by twisting and plaiting threads together.

The genesis of ornamental design for such laces is, I fancy, pretty well established through the classification of kindred designs, beginning with those involving simple abstract and geometric forms; these are gradually succeeded by others with conventional and more varied devices, suggesting plant and animal life; and these followed by others in which definitely realistic renderings of actual things are aimed at. Thus, very broadly, we have three typical groups, and of the first your photographs Nos. 3, 6, 7, with 29, 30, and 86, give examples; of the second group there are examples in photographs Nos. 11, 12, 16, 17, &c.; and the third group is illustrated by Nos. 36 and 37, 90 to 93, and 116.

The sixteenth-century Italian pattern books are mainly concerned with designs for lace of the first group as distinct from embroidery on linen or net. The period of the second group is established by the laces one finds represented in paintings by such painters as Vandyck, Rembrandt, Gonzales Coques, Mignard, and Hyacinthe Rigaud, whilst the generality of the designs in the third group is safely attributable to designers employed towards the end of the seventeenth century, and during the eighteenth by the Royal or State subsidised manufactories of France, about which several local records, quoted by Mademoiselle Despierre in her book on the Points d'AlenÇon, are particularly interesting. Laces of rather indeterminate design, such as those which we call peasant laces, have, as a rule, a quaint treatment of pattern, the origin of which is, I think, almost invariably to be referred to some carefully designed prototype; but the charm of such peasant laces lies chiefly in the goodness of their texture combined with a distortion of forms, which arises from the workers' naÏvetÉ in misunderstanding the parent design. The really valuable work was that of sympathetic and skilled workers, done directly from well-designed patterns.

Now the origin of needle-point and bobbin-made laces is, I think, Occidental, or European, and not Oriental; and the three broadly indicated pattern groups are accompanied by three equally recognisable sorts of texture. The first of them is comparatively stiff and wiry; the second more lissom and inclined to tapiness; and the third, still more lissom, becoming gauzy and filmy in quality. Delicate, filmy laces, common to the eighteenth century, could not, therefore, I think, have been dreamt of in the sixteenth century; neither at that time was there a conception of the tapey, and at times linen-like, laces made in the early part and middle of the seventeenth century. Hence we seem able to rely upon an apparent procession of design types, running concurrently with an equally apparent procession of qualities of texture. By keeping in mind these combined successions of pattern and texture one is enabled not only to classify laces, but also to account for later survivals of old types, as well as for the approximate dates when old and new types severally have arisen.

It is evident that the French word "dentelle," which is a comprehensive term for laces, came from the "dents," or tooth-shaped borders and edges of lace made soon after the beginning of the sixteenth century. At the same time, there had been during two centuries earlier, a fashion of jagging or cutting into points or scallops the borders of cloth silk and velvet costumes, gowns, hoods, and long sleeves. But when the notably increased use of linen shirts, with cuffs and small collars just showing beyond the outer garments occurred in the sixteenth century, white and coloured thread purlings and taut fringings or edgings were made for them, and so came to be called "points," "dents" and "punti" as the cut borders of cloth costumes had been. The latter fashion gradually obscured the former, and thus the terms "point," "dent," and "punto" were almost solely applied to ornamentation in real lace or in lace-like fabrics. In still later times, as you notice, point lace is generally understood to be the designation of needle-point lace, or "dentelle À l'aiguille," as distinct from the "dentelle au fuseau," bobbin or pillow-made lace.

I have been tempted to touch upon this matter of lace points, vandykes, and scallops because the border of the alb, said to have been worn by Pope Boniface VIII., consists of scallops of bobbin-made thread-work, and of a type of pattern and texture which I should say cannot very well be earlier in date than the middle of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the ornamental thread-work done in "punto di treccia" and "punto a stuora," which fills large and small squares and remarkable five-sided figures, seems to have some Saracenic or Moorish character, and may possibly not be assignable to the sixteenth century with the same cogency of inference as applies to the scallops of Italian "merletti a piombini" on the border of the alb.

Whatever may be the result of further inquiries concerning the tradition of Pope Boniface having worn this alb, and therefore establishing its date as being late thirteenth century, I hope that you will retain it as an illustration in your book.

Whilst the majority of your photographs are from generally well-known varieties of lace, those from the earlier drawn thread-works and darning upon different makes of square mesh, net, or grounds of radiating, intertwisted threads, are particularly interesting—and the entire series, accompanied by your descriptions, forms a most valuable encyclopÆdia of designs and textures to be seen in laces and cognate fabrics.

Believe me to be,

Yours very truly,

Alan S. Cole.