Read Ebook: Samplers and Tapestry Embroideries Second Edition by Huish Marcus B Marcus Bourne

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"Love thou thee Lord and he will be a tender father unto thee."

A preference for saws rather than rhymes continues until the eighteenth century is well advanced. The following are instances:--

Another undated one of the period is:--

"Awake, arise behold thou Hast thy Life ALIFe ThY Breath ABLASt at night LY Down Prepare to have thy Sleep thy Death thy Bed Thy Grave."

One with leisure might search out the authors of the doggerel religious and moral verses which adorned samplers. The majority are probably due to the advent of Methodism, for we only find them occurring in any numbers in the years which followed that event. It may be noted that "Divine and Moral Songs for Children," by Isaac Watts, was first published in 1720, that Wesley's Hymns appeared in 1736, and Dr Doddridge's in 1738.

We may here draw attention to the eighteenth-century fashion of setting out the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments , and other lengthy manuscripts from the Old Testament in tablets similar to those painted and hung in the churches of the time. The tablets in the samplers are flanked on either side by full length figures of Christ and Moses, or supported by the chubby winged cherubs of the period which are the common adornments of the Georgian gravestones. In the exhibition at The Fine Art Society's were specimens dated 1715, 1735, 1740, 1757, and 1762, the Belief taking, in three instances, the place of the Commandments. On occasions the pupil showed her proficiency in modern languages as well as with the needle, by setting out the Lord's Prayer in French, or even in Hebrew.

The last-named samplers by three sisters of the Bront? family which, through the kindness of their owner, Mr Clement Shorter, I am able to include here, have, it will be seen, little except a personal interest attaching to them. In comparison with those which accompany them they show a strange lack of ornament, and a monotony of colour which deprive them of all attractiveness in themselves. But when it is remembered who made them, and their surroundings, these appear singularly befitting and characteristic. For, as the dates upon them show, they were produced in the interval which was passed by the sisters at home between leaving one ill-fated school, which caused the deaths of two sisters, and their passing to another. It was a mournful, straitened home in which they lived, one in which it needed the ardent Protestantism that is breathed in the texts broidered on the samplers to uphold them from a despair that can almost be read between the lines. It was also, for one at least of them, a time of ceaseless activity of mind and body, and we can well understand that the child Charlotte, who penned, between the April in which her sampler was completed and the following August, the manuscript of twenty-two volumes, each sixty closely written pages, of a catalogue, did not take long to work the sampler which bears her name. The ages of the three girls when they completed these samplers were: Charlotte, 13; Emily Jane, 11; and Anne, 10.

But the lengthiest task of all was set to six poor little mortals in the Orphans' School, near Calcutta, in Bengal, East Indies. These wrought six samplers "by the direction of Mistress Parker," dividing between them the longest chapter in the Bible, namely, the 119th Psalm. It was evidently a race against time, for on each is recorded the date of its commencement and finish, being accomplished by them between the 14th of February and the 23rd of June 1797. At the top of each is a view of a different portion of the school; one of these is reproduced in Fig. 3.

Returning to the chronological aspect of sampler inscriptions. As the eighteenth century advances we find verses coming more and more into fashion, although at first they are hardly distinguishable from prose, as, for instance, in the following of 1718:--

More than one proposal has been made, in all seriousness, during the compilation of this volume, that it would add enormously to its interest and value if every inscription that could be found upon samplers were herein set out at length. It is needless to say that it has been altogether impossible to entertain such a task. It is true that the feature of samplers which, perhaps, interests and amuses persons most is the quaint and incongruous legends that so many of them bear, but I shall, I believe, have quite sufficiently illustrated this aspect of the subject if I divide it into various groups, and give a few appropriate examples of each. These may be classified under various headings.

Verses commemorating Religious Festivals

These are, perhaps, more frequent than any others. Especially is this the case with those referring to Easter, which is again and again the subject of one or other of the following verses:--

"The holy feast of Easter was injoined To bring Christ's Resurrection to our Mind, Rise then from Sin as he did from the Grave, That by his Merits he your Souls may save.

Or the following:--

Or the variation set out on Fig. 19.

As also in that by Kitty Harison, in our illustration, Fig. 13.

The Christmas verse is usually:--

"Glory to God in the Highest";

but an unusual one is that in Margaret Fiddes's sampler, 1773:--

"The Night soon past, it ran so fast. The Day Came on Amain. Our Sorrows Ceast Our Hopes Encreast once more to Meet again A Star appears Expells all Fears Angels give Kings to Know A Babe was sent With that intent to Conquer Death below."

Ascension Day is marked by:--

Whilst Passion Week is recognisable in:--

"Behold the patient Lamb, before his shearer stands," etc.

The Crucifixion itself, although it is portrayed frequently in German samplers , is seldom, if ever, found in English ones, but for Good Friday we have the lines:--

"Alas and did my Saviour bleed For such a worm as I?"

Verses taking the Form of Prayers, Dedications, Etc.

Amongst all the verses that adorn samplers there were none which apparently commended themselves so much as those that dedicated the work to Christ. The lines usually employed are so familiar as hardly to need setting out, but they have frequent varieties. The most usual is:--

A variation of this appears in the much earlier piece of Lora Standish .

Another, less common, but which again links the sampler with a religious aspiration, runs:--

Verses to be used upon rising in the morning or at bedtime are not unfrequent; the following is the modest prayer of Jane Grace Marks .

"If I am right, oh teach my heart Still in the right to stay, If I am wrong, thy grace impart To find that better way."

But one in my possession loses, by its ludicrousness, all the impressiveness which was intended:--

"Oh may thy powerful word Inspire a breathing worm To rush into thy kingdom Lord To take it as by storm.

Lastly, a prayer for the teacher:--

Verses Referring to Life and Death

The fact that "Religion never was designed to make our pleasures less" appears seldom or never to have entered into the minds of those who set the verses for young sampler workers. From the earliest days when they plied their needle their thoughts were directed to the shortness of life and the length of eternity, and many a healthy and sweet disposition must have run much chance of being soured by the morbid view which it was forced to take of the pleasures of life. For instance, a child of seven had the task of broidering the following lines:--

"And now my soul another year Of thy short life is past I cannot long continue here And this may be my last."

And one, no older, is made to declare that:--

"Thus sinners trifle, young and old, Until their dying day, Then would they give a world of gold To have an hour to pray."

Or:--

"Our father ate forbidden Fruit, And from his glory fell; And we his children thus were brought To death, and near to hell."

Or again:--

"There's not a sin that we commit Nor wicked word we say But in thy dreadful book is writ Against the judgment day."

A child was not even allowed to wish for length of days. Poor little Elizabeth Raymond, who finished her sampler in 1789, in her eighth year, had to ask:--

"Lord give me wisdom to direct my ways I beg not riches nor yet length of days My life is a flower, the time it hath to last Is mixed with frost and shook with every blast."

A similar idea runs through the following:--

"Gay dainty flowers go simply to decay, Poor wretched life's short portion flies away; We eat, we drink, we sleep, but lo anon Old age steals on us never thought upon."

Not less lugubrious is Esther Tabor's sampler, who, in 1771, amidst charming surroundings of pots of roses and carnations, intersperses the lines:--

"Our days, alas, our mortal days Are short and wretched too Evil and few the patriarch says And well the patriarch knew."

A very common verse, breathing the same strain, is:--

"Fragrant the rose, but it fades in time The violet sweet, but quickly past the Prime White lilies hang their head and soon decay And whiter snow in minutes melts away Such and so with'ring are our early joys Which time or sickness speedily destroys."

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