"Saw a very pretty procession of three hundred girls in good order, two and two march with three women drummers beating, and a guard of twenty young men on horseback. Each of the females had a white rod in her hand, on the top of which was a tossil made of white and bleu ribband (which they said was the Queen's coleurs) and bone-lace, the great manufacture. Then they had wandered about the town from ten in the morning [it was eight in the evening when he saw them] huzzaing every now and then, and then wearing their rodds. Then they returned at nine, and then break up very weary and hungary."[7]
[7] Quoted in "Some Seventeenth Century Topography," _Western Morning News_, May 9th, 1876.
Taste declined during the latter part of last century, and some of the designs of Honiton lace were truly barbarous--frying-pans, snails, drumsticks, and stiff flowers. But there were always some who did better. At the beginning of this century all taste was bad. Bald imitations of nature prevailed, without any regard to the exigencies of art. Roses and other flowers were worked in perspective; it was thought sufficient to servilely copy nature and leave grouping to chance.
Queen Adelaide had a dress made of Honiton lace. By her desire all the flowers were copied from nature, and the first letter of each spelt her name.
Amaranth. Daphne. Eglantine. Lilac. Auricula. Ivy. Dahlia. Eglantine.
The present Queen also had her wedding-dress of Honiton lace, and it cost a thousand pounds.
Unhappily, design sank very low. Perhaps the lowest stage of degradation in design was reached in 1867, when a Honiton lace shawl sent to the Paris Exhibition from Exeter received a prize and commendation. Nothing can be conceived worse. That it should have been rewarded with a medal shows that either the judges pardoned the ineptitude in design for the sake of the excellence of the work, or else that they themselves stood on the same level of artistic incompetence which then prevailed. Since then, happily, design has been more studied. There is still a good deal of very sorry stuff produced--as far as artistic design is concerned--but at the same time there is much faithful copying of good antique work. All old work is not good; there were bad artists in the past, but the general taste was better than it is now. I was once in the shop of one of our foremost furniture dealers and decorators in town, when a young married couple came in to choose curtains and carpets for their new home. I had been talking with the head of the establishment about artistic furniture, and he had shown me carpets, curtains, and wall-papers, such as no designer in the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries would have blushed to produce. The young couple passed all these samples by--blind to their merits, and pounced on and chose some atrocious stuff, bad in colour and bad in art. When they were gone, the proprietor turned to me: "You see," he said, "the public is still uncultivated; we are forced to keep rubbish in our trade to satisfy those whose taste does not rise above rubbish." Now it is the same with regard to lace. There is badly designed lace as well as that which is as good as anything drawn by a great master in the past. Let the public eye be discerning to choose the good and reject the evil, and then the poor lace-workers will not be set to produce stuff that never ought to have time, labour, eyesight devoted to it.