Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. STYLE. In venturing to approach so great a subject as the history of style, I would beg my readers to believe how well I am aware that on each point much more has been already carefully treated by previous writers, than will fall within the limits of a chapter that is intended only to throw light on textile art, and especially on embroidery. I suppose it is the same in all subjects of human speculation which are worthy of serious study; and therefore I ought not to have been surprised to find how much has already been written on needlework-and embroidery, and how unconsciously I, at least, have passed by and ignored these notices, till it struck me that I ought to know something of the history and principles of the art which with others, I was striving to revive and improve. Then new and old facts crowded round me, and became significant and interesting. I longed to know something of the first worker and the first needle ; and behold the needle has been found!—among the debris of the life of the Neolithic cave-man, made of bone and very neatly fashioned. Alas ! the workwoman and her work are gone to dust; but there is the needle!—proof positive that the craft existed before the last glacial period in Britain.1 How long ago this was, we may conjecture, but can never finally ascertain. Then I find embroidery named by the earliest historians, by every poet of antiquity, and by the first travellers in the East; and it has been the subjectof laws and enactments from the date of the Code of Manu in India, to the present century. One becomes eager to Systematize all this information, and to share with the workers and thinkers of the craft, the pleasure found in its study. 1 Boyd Dawkins' " Early Man in Britain," p. 285. Sec also chapter on stitches (fast), p.... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.