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The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to sensuous delight an imperious need for which the fond imagination of Rome has officiously opened the door.
Here was another locked door, beside which was a bell, which the prince rang three times. The door was opened, and he walked through a long corridor. The passage widened, and the prince was now in a brilliant hall, decorated with paintings and gildings. The entrance through the small house was plainly but a circuitous road to one of the palaces of the Faubourg St.
The obvious charm of the church is the elegant grandeur of the nave its perfect shapeliness and its rich simplicity, its long double row of white marble columns and its high flat roof, embossed with intricate gildings and mouldings. It opens into a choir of an extraordinary splendour of effect, which I recommend you to look out for of a fine afternoon.
The staircase and halls in the upper story alone must have cost enormous sums, as well as the chapel on the first floor, which is very rich and gorgeous. The saloons and apartments are decorated in a peculiarly splendid manner with a multiplicity of frescoes, oil-paintings, sculptures, gildings, costly silk-hangings, marbles, etc.
She was no opéra-comique Mère Boby going into ecstasies over the gildings and fine trinkets; the vases of flowers on every landing of the staircase she ascended behind her trunk, the hall-lamps supported by bronze statues, did not prevent her noticing that there was a finger's depth of dust on the stair-rail and that the carpet was torn.
Under the centre isle runs a vault, the whole length of the church, for the reception of those who chuse to pay an additional guinea. The organ excels; the paintings, mouldings and gildings are superb: whether the stranger takes an external or an internal survey, the eye is struck with delight, and he pronounces the whole the work of a matter.
Miss Mary, all in white, her hair hanging over her shoulders, hastened to Darvid's study, through drawing-rooms in which, from behind black veils which the pale dawn was removing, emerged glass, metal, pictures, mirrors, plush, silk, polished surfaces, gildings, mosaics, marbles, porcelain, in the dull gleam of their colors.
And the birds, you may be sure, have their nests also in the house of the holy one. They are wont indeed to soil the carpets and the mats on which the worshippers kneel, and their nests are so many blots up there amid the gildings of the carved cedarwood; but then their song, the symphony that issues from that aviary, is so sweet to the living who pray and to the dead who dream. . . .
The Chinese summer-house, which you may distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor. We pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings, gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses. You will not be sorry, I believe, by this time to have done with Strawberry Hill, and to hear a little news.
We will suppose they require about thirty rolls of wall-paper. Philip buys the heaviest French velvet, with gildings and traceries, at four dollars a roll. This, by the time it has been put on, with gold mouldings, according to the most established taste of the best paper-hangers, will bring the wall-paper of the two rooms to a figure something like two hundred dollars.
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