detail so artistic that it is the despair of the cabinet makers of our
age.

The beauty of the thirteenth century needlework made into chasubles,
copes, albs, stoles, altar covers,--triumphs of artistic excellence, is
seen in the typical example of the Cope of Ascoli for which Mr. Pierpont
Morgan about ten years ago, paid sixty thousand dollars. So high a price
was paid for this ecclesiastical vestment not because it was an antique
but because marvelous expertness in artcraft had given it such value. Be
it recorded to the honor of the American millionaire, that he returned
the treasure to a church in Italy when he discovered that he had
unknowingly bought stolen property.

Of iron-mongery of Dante's time, the author of the Thirteenth the
Greatest of Centuries writes as follows: "It is difficult to understand
how one of the village blacksmiths of the time made a handsome gate that
has been the constant admiration of posterity ever since, or designed
high hinges for doors that artists delight to copy, or locks and latches
and bolts that are transported to our museums to be looked at with
interest not only because they are antiques but for the wonderful
combination of the beautiful and the useful which they illustrate. The
surprise grows the greater when we realize that these beautiful objects
were made not only in one place or even in a few places, but in nearly
every town of any size in England, France, Italy, Germany and Spain at
various times during the thirteenth century and that at any time a town
of considerably less than ten thousand inhabitants seemed to be able to
obtain among its own inhabitants, men who could make such works of art
not as copies nor in servile imitation of others, but with original
ideas of their own, and make them in such perfection that in many cases
they have remained the models for many centuries."