14 and 15, part of the elaborate fittings of a piece of furniture which occupied the place of honour in the state-rooms of the wealthy, and upon which the art of the day was generally lavished with a most liberal hand. Ivory, ebony, and the rarest woods were employed in their construction, occasionally plaques of lapis lazuli, or coloured marbles, were used for the panels; ultimately the whole surface became an encrusted mosaic of figures, birds, and flowers, in coloured wood and stone, occasionally framed in the precious metals. The gorgeous taste of Louis Quatorze excited the fancy of the ébenistes of his court to the most costly invention. Furniture inlaid with engraved metal-work, or embossed with coloured stones, oppressed the sense of utility; and when tables, chairs, and picture-frames were made of silver, chased and overloaded with the scroll-work he so abundantly patronised, common sense seems to have yielded its place to mere display. Despite of the costly character of such works, and their destination as the decoration of a palace, they are positive vulgarisms, and we feel little regret when we read in history of the disastrous wars at the close of the king’s career, which obliged him to melt down the silver furniture of Versailles, and convert it into cash for the payment of his soldiers.

There was more honesty of purpose in the old art-workers, who never swerved from a leading principle. Hence the educated eye can at once detect a piece of genuine old decorative furniture from a Wardour Street made-up bit of pseudo-imitation. It must be borne in mind that specimens of genuine old work are by no means common; the abundance which this street and other localities can supply to order by the cart-load, are ingenious adaptations of fragments of old work pieced and placed together for a general effect; but which are sometimes ludicrous, from the mixture of bits of all ages and style in one cabinet or sideboard. Some twenty years ago the city of Rouen was a mine of wealth to furniture makers. The elaborately carved panels and chimney-pieces in the stately houses of the old Norman capital, were converted into all kinds of articles for domestic display. The progress of “improvement,” as well as the slower process of decay, have cleared that place of many of its fine features of domestic architecture; but its beauties have had an enduring memento in the curious volumes by the artist Langlois, of Pont-de-l’Arche, completed after his death by M. Delaquérrière. In this work every ancient building is carefully noted and described, throughout every street of the city; and the finest or most curious examples engraved with a minute truthfulness for which Langlois was justly celebrated; and which drew forth the plaudits of Dr. Dibdin, in the sumptuous work devoted to his foreign tour in search of rarities.15-*

We propose presently to follow the Doctor in his investigation of old books, and exhibit some few of the enrichments that artist and engraver gave to the written or printed volumes which passed from their hands; at the same time we shall endeavour to take a more general survey of the adaptation of art to works of ordinary use.

Fig. 16.

The quaint manner in which letters were sometimes braced together may be seen in Fig. 16. Occasionally, a name thus formed in monogram would require much ingenuity to unravel, inasmuch as the entire letters made but one interlaced and closely compacted group, each limb or portion of a letter helping also to form part of another. In the hospital founded at Edinburgh by the famous goldsmith, George Heriot,—the favourite goldsmith and jeweller of James I., a monarch who fully appreciated his art,—the name of “Jingling Geordie,” as his majesty playfully called him, is sculptured in such a group, which appears at first sight an enigma few could unravel; indeed, without knowing what letters to look for, and how to arrange them, it is a chance if they would be arranged correctly. Such a mode of marking would, however, have its advantages, for it would enable those who were in the secret to unravel the mystery of the true proprietorship of any valuable article unfairly abstracted. The shields in Fig. 13 are filled with monograms less elaborate, but bearing a sufficient affinity to those alluded to, to aid in understanding the rest.

CHAPTER II.

We owe the term illumination, as applied to the decoration of old manuscripts, to the mediæval Latin name of the artist himself, alluminor, the root of our English word limner, and of the French word enlumineur, one who colours or paints upon paper or parchment, giving light and ornament to letters and figures. The brilliancy and beauty of much of this ancient art are marvellous to look upon, but the names of few of the patient artists, who devoted their lives to book illustration, have descended to us. There are, however, one or two names well-known to us, a Julio Clovio and a Girolamo da Libri (Jerome Veronese), affording a sufficient warrant of the high-class minds who honoured their art by honouring literature. There can be no greater pleasure than in turning over the matchless pages of these old volumes, and seeing them reveal the passages of the poet or romancist, as understood by the men of the Middle Ages, to whom they were addressed, or giving us pictures of life and manners of which we possess no other record. Their value as adjuncts to books, when simply decorative, is now very generally acknowledged; and the ladies of the present day rival the cloistered recluses in labouring, like them, to enrich a cherished volume. It is, however, the art of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that is now especially imitated, and the reason is to be found in its showy elaboration of design and colour. There is an earlier style that presents strong claims to attention, that of the two preceding centuries, specimens of which are given in Figs. 17-21. In them will be noticed the Orientalism that occasionally prevails, and shows its Byzantine parentage; a trace of the Greek volute and acanthus leaf is visible in Figs. public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@26449@[email protected]#fig020" class="pginternal"