href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@43805@[email protected]#illo10" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Fig. 10 in Chapter III. is a remarkable example of Gibbon's carving of fruits, flowers, and foliage.

Readers who are familiar with the Belgian churches will remember the wonderful carvings at Brussels and Mecklin by Drevot and Laurens, who were pupils of Gibbon. They out-Gibbon Gibbon in their realism.

In Fig. 4, photographed for this book by the South Kensington authorities, we give an illustration of a carving in pinewood of a pendant of flowers attributed to Gibbon. It originally decorated the Church of St. Mary Somerset, Thames Street, E.C., built 1695—one of Wren's City churches so wantonly destroyed. To see Gibbon's wood carving at its best we must go to St. Paul's Cathedral, Windsor Castle, and Hampton Court Palace. At Windsor we shall also see carved marble panels of trophies, emblems and realistic fruits, flowers and shell-fish on the pedestal of the statue of Charles II. At Charing Cross we have another example of his stone carving on the pedestal of the statue of Charles the Martyr.

We have already referred to the Church of St. Mary Abchurch in Abchurch Lane, between King William Street and Cannon Street, City. It was built in 1686, eleven years after the first stone of St. Paul's was laid. It also serves for the parish of St. Laurence Pountney. It lies in a quiet backwater off the busy stream, and the flagged courtyard is still surrounded by a few contemporary houses. Externally it is not beautiful, but Wren and Gibbon expended loving care on the really beautiful interior. The soft light from the quaint circular and round-headed windows casts a gentle radiance over the carved festoons of fruit, palm-leaves and the "pelican in her piety."

Just across, on the other side of Cannon Street, is another backwater, Laurence Pountney Hill. Two of the old Queen Anne houses remain, No. 1 and No. 2, with beautiful old hooded doorways dated 1703. The circular hoods are supported by carved lion-headed brackets. The jambs are ornamented with delicate interlaced carving. No. 2 has been mutilated as to its windows, and a modern excrescence has been built on to the ground floor; but No. 1 appears to be much as it left the builders' hands in 1703, and still possesses the old wide staircase with twisted "barley-sugar" balusters and carved rose newel pendants. These houses may or may not have been designed by Wren. They seem to bear the impress of his genius, and in any case they give us a glimpse—and such glimpses are all too rare—of the homes of the City fathers, just as the little church across Cannon Street brings us in touch with their religious life in the early days of Queen Anne.

Fig. 5 represents an interesting series of turned balusters taken from old houses of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They are executed in oak, lime, ash and pinewood—mostly the latter; and many of the details will be found repeated in the furniture legs of the Queen Anne period. The photograph was specially taken for this volume by the courtesy of the Director and Secretary of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Fig. 6 represents a contemporary doorway of a room formerly at No. 3 Clifford's Inn. It is of oak, with applied carvings in cedar of acanthus-leaf work, enclosing a cherub's head and a broken pediment terminating in volutes. We shall find members of the same cherub family on the exterior of St. Mary Abchurch. Fig. 7 is the overmantel of the same room with a marble mantelpiece of somewhat later date. This room, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was erected in 1686 by John Penhallow, who resided there till 1716.

Fig. 8 is a beautiful doorway carved in yellow pine, with Corinthian columns and pediment. We shall find similar pediments in the tower of Wren's church, St. Andrew's, Holborn. This doorway with the carved mantelpiece (Fig. 9) came from an old house in Carey Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. These belong to the early part of the eighteenth century.

These are but a few isolated examples of beautiful settings to the furniture of the period of the revival of classical architecture in England. Such things are not for the modest collector, who will content himself with the chairs, tables, and bureaux of the period—articles, in the main, of severe outline devoid of carving, and relying for effect much upon the rich tones of the wood employed, but withal eminently beautiful, inasmuch as they were and are eminently useful.

CHAPTER III: MIRRORS, STOOLS, AND SOME NOTES ON A QUEEN ANNE BEDROOM

The mirror, at the present time, is so generally an accepted necessary of life, and so indispensable in many of its situations, that it may seem remarkable that not until the sixteenth century was it in anything like general use in England. The pleasure and interest of reflection must have been felt from the time when "the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night." Still water must have been the first mirror of the first man and woman in which they discovered their astonished faces, and where it is possible that, like Narcissus, they fell in love with their own reflections. Thus we find Eve saying in "Paradise Lost":