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Below the tapestry a carved walnut wainscoting went round the room, and the door was panelled and flanked by fluted doorposts of the same dark wood, on which rested corbels fashioned into curling acanthus leaves, to hold up the cornice, which itself made a high shelf over the door.
The windows on the ground-floor, which are usually small, are closed by a wooden or iron grating, and are placed too high in the wall for passengers to look through them, and frequently, even in the best houses, small recesses in the walls serve as shops. The upper storeys usually project beyond the ground-floor, and are supported on corbels or brackets of stone, which also are frequently carved.
The roof was flat, but had been richly gilt and painted, and was sustained by corbels of angels, divinely carved. There had been some pews in the building; some had fallen to pieces, and some remained, but these were not in the original design. The sacred table had disappeared, but two saintly statues, sculptured in black oak, seemed still to guard the spot which it had consecrated.
On the point of each gable is an old stone figure the one a tortoise, the other a lion couchant and upon the back of each of these old figures, so completely accordant with the building itself, which exhibits under its eaves and at the corners of its windows numbers of those grotesque corbels which distinguish our buildings of an early date, both domestic and ecclesiastical, good Mr.
At each corner of the transept the thickening of the wall over the clearstorey arcade is carried by a shaft which rises from the bench-table or the ground. The roof is entirely modern, and the shields on its corbels bear the arms of the chief promoters of the last restoration. The figure of Lady Markenfield has, unfortunately, been destroyed.
The ordinary conditions of perfection in form, gesture, or feature, are willingly dispensed with, when the ugly dwarf and ungainly goblin have only to gather themselves into angles, or crouch to carry corbels; and the want of skill which, in other kinds of work would have been required for the finishing of the parts, will at once be forgiven here, if you have only disposed ingeniously what you have executed roughly, and atoned for the rudeness of your hands by the quickness of your wits.
Here, upon the capital of each column, rests a sort of compound rectangular plinth, from which project three corbels, hollowed underneath and having little blocks beneath their overhanging edge. From this plinth and corbels springs a cluster of no less than five shafts, which, by their united width, conceal the springing of the upper order of the main arches.
Entered by a passage from the south transept, and built across the back of the apse, it is an oblong room with coffered barrel vault, lit by a large semicircular window at the north end. The cornice, of which the frieze is adorned with eight masks, rests on corbels. On a black-and-white marble lavatory is the date 1593 and the Cardinal's arms.
These ribs spring from slender pillars between the windows and corbels heads on the other side: over the exterior of the windows are carved grotesque heads, of which we give some illustrations. The south walk of the cloisters is the more richly groined. At the south-east corner is a square turreted tower containing a small chamber, which has been carefully and completely restored.
At Rochester they could not in either case resist temptation. Their clerestory contains plain and uninteresting three-light windows, which are, moreover, unsymmetrically placed with regard to the arches beneath them. The roof is apparently of the same date; it is flat and of wood, carried by corbels carved and painted to represent angels bearing shields.
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