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At a hotel in Cornwall a tea-garden was, and probably is still, ornamented with seats constructed of the carved oak from a neighbouring church no doubt the restorer's perquisite. "Poor places which cannot afford to pay a clerk of the works suffer much in these ecclesiastical convulsions.
Gimblet was a connoisseur of the antique, and a few minutes' examination proved to him that this was a genuine old clock, untouched by the restorer's hand, and in an excellent state of preservation.
We have, then, to correct in imagination the restorer's misdoings, and also to omit the tree- trunk supports, which the bronze originals did not need. Further, the two figures should probably be advancing in the same direction, instead of in converging lines. When these changes are made, the group cannot fail to command our admiration.
But the most wonderful monuments of the great restorer's skill are the patients who have lost both legs, nullipeds, as presented to Mr. Palmer, bilignipeds, as they walk forth again before the admiring world, balanced upon their two new-born members. We have before us delineations of six of these hybrids between the animal and vegetable world.
This chapel has been so completely restored that it has a thoroughly neat and modern appearance, and has lost all its archæological value; round it runs a Norman arcade, and on the north side an aumbry may be seen. The north transept retains its Norman arcading, which, fortunately, has not been touched by the restorer's hand; how long it may escape is doubtful, as it is much mutilated.
The angels beneath the Virgin's feet are lovely, but the group of seraphs behind are the least pleasing of all. They are of the earth, earthy, and seem reminiscences of the Florentine maidens the artist met in the streets. Possibly this is the part most injured by the restorer's hand.
This may be illustrated by the operation of "interpreting" an old manuscript which has got partially obliterated, or of "restoring" a faded picture; in each of which operations error will be pretty sure to creep in through an importation of the restorer's own ideas into the relic of the past.
The warm light which relieves the purple of Zoroaster above, is laid in by him. I don't know if I should have liked it better, flat, as it was, against the dark purple; it seems to me quite beautiful now. The full red flush on the face of the Astronomy is the restorer's doing also. She was much paler, if not quite pale. Under St. Luke. Medallion, a stern man, with sickle and spade.
The restorer's buildings are round about you, his library and temples, in their new splendour typical of his hope. But wherein, after all, lies the greatness of the greatest of them? The Temple of Zeus imposes chiefly, I think, by its display of the world-wide power of Hadrian.
Montacute Church is a building that has seen much legitimate "tinkering," not of the restorer's brand but of the sort that delights the antiquary. The earliest work is very early Norman.
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