27 
[December, 19 2 0 
(Above) Maria Anna 
Mayr was a German, 
and her taste ran to im¬ 
perialism. 18 th Century 
(Below) Another Ger¬ 
man sampler, from the 
same period. Both are 
in the Metropolitan 
a house of a bright scarlet, with yellow 
windows, a green door, and a blue roof: 
on one side, a man with a dog; on the 
other, a woman with a cat—this is Lucy’s 
information; I should never have guessed 
that there was any difference, except in 
color, between the man and the woman, the 
dog and the cat, they were in form, height, 
and size, alike to a thread, the man gray, 
the woman in pink, his attendant white 
and hers black. Next to the three figures, 
on either side, rose two fir-trees from two 
red flower-pots, nice little round bushes of 
a bright green or intermixed with brown 
stitches, which Lucy explained, not to me 
—‘Don’t you see the fir-cones, sir ? Don’t 
you remember how fond she used to be of pick¬ 
ing them up in her little basket at the dear old 
place? Toor thing, I thought of her all the 
time I was working them! Don’t you like the 
fir-cones?’ After this, I looked at the land¬ 
scape almost as lovingly as Lucy herself.” 
Never was written a more delightful descrip¬ 
tion of a sampler, embroidered primer of the 
craft of needlework in the days of long ago! 
What would we not give to come across 
Lucy’s sampler, or Miss Mitford’s, in our col¬ 
lecting browsings! Time has brought to us 
the samplers embroidered by Charlotte Bronte 
and the samplers of her sisters, Emily and 
Anne—Charlotte’s worked in 1829, Emily’s in 
the same year, and Anne’s in 1830. If any 
A sampler of Spanish ori¬ 
gin, \Zth-\9th Centuries 
An American sampler from the early 
part of the 19 th Century, still in ex¬ 
cellent condition 
American, of the l&th-\9th Centuries. 
The house, it would appear, is of brick, 
with a simple, dignified entrance 
extant samplers are more austerely elegant, 
more elegantly austere I have yet to behold 
them. They were worked in black silk on 
coarse gray canvas. Charlotte’s contains 
seven lettered quotations, her name and 
date, all within a simple border. Emily’s 
sampler and Anne’s were worked with the 
same border design and with lettered quo¬ 
tations. I know of nothing more sombre 
in samplers unless, perhaps, the sentiment 
which Eleanor Knot embroidered on hers, 
albeit in gay-colored threads: 
“With soothing wiles he won my heart, 
He sigh’d and vow’d, but oh he feigned the smart; 
Sure of all friends the blackest we can find 
Are ingrates who stab our peace of mind.” 
We all know the ancient churchyard verse 
so often given—surely never selected by—little 
girls to work in their samplers: 
“Man’s life is like unto a winter’s day, 
Some break their fast and so depart away. 
Others stay dinner, and then depart full fed. 
The largest age but sups and goes to bed.” 
Robert Herrick, the English poet of the 17th 
Century, probably had read the verses on 
neighborhood samplers, for in his poem "'The 
Wounded Heart” we find these lines: 
“Come bring your sampler, and with art 
Draw in’t a wounded heart.” 
In a sampler dated 1742, now in the Vic- 
(Continued on page 68) 
From England of Queen 
Anne’s time. A sampler 
of unsymmetrical de¬ 
sign and varied colors 
Along with a variety of typical sampler birds and beasts, this ISth-Wh Century Spanish 
example combines drawnwork and embroidered effects 
An old English sampler 
with the alphabet, nu¬ 
merals, cat, swan and 
an angular frog 
