"At first the figures and groups, which rendered this manufacture
popular, were copies of favourite paintings; but, as taste improved and
skill increased, they showed more of originality in their conceptions,
if not more of nature in their forms. They exhibited, in common with all
other works of art, the mixed taste of the times--a grotesque union of
classical and Hebrew history--of martial life and pastoral repose--of
Greek gods and Romish saints. Absurd as such combinations certainly
were, and destitute of those beauties of form and delicate gradations
and harmony of colour which distinguish paintings worthily so
called--still when the hall was lighted up, and living faces thronged
the floor, the silent inhabitants of the walls would seem, in the eyes
of our ancestors, something very splendid. As painting rose in fame,
tapestry sunk in estimation. The introduction of a lighter and less
massive mode of architecture abridged the space for its accommodation,
and by degrees the stiff and fanciful creations of the loom vanished
from our walls. The art is now neglected. I am sorry for this, because I
cannot think meanly of an art which engaged the heads and hands of the
ladies of England, and gave to the tapestried hall of elder days fame
little inferior to what now waits on a gallery of paintings."

Passing over Holbein, Sir Antonio Moore, Vandyke, Lely, Kneller, and
Thornhill, we come to the lives of Hogarth--Wilson--Reynolds and
Gainsborough--from which we select a few characteristic anecdotes and
sketches. In noticing Hogarth's early life, Mr. Cunningham has thrown
some discredit on a book, which on its publication, made not a little
chat among artists:--

"Of those early days I find this brief notice in Smith's Life of
Nollekens the sculptor. 'I have several times heard Mr. Nollekens