Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 5, 2025
It chanced that the infant with his maid had strayed one morning to a mile's distance from the avenue of Brere-wood Lodge, his father's seat. Their attention was attracted by a carriage drawn by six stately long-failed black horses, and with as much carving and gilding as would have done honour to my lord mayor's.
The Emperor's sleeping-room, the only part of the building in which there was a fireplace, was ornamented with wainscoting in Chinese lacquer work, then very old, though the painting and gilding were still fresh, and the cabinet was decorated like the bedroom; and all the apartments, except this, were warmed in winter by immense stoves, which greatly injured the effect of the interior architecture.
"When the meal was ended, however, he joined us as we stood at the inn door looking out into the night. A moon was rising above the palms, and gilding the cupolas of the Bureau Arabe on the far side of the Market Square. A distant noise of tomtoms and African pipes was audible.
For this is the trouble: The café is not an English institution and something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding and red velvet pleasantly reminiscent, but for night after night it would not answer at all as the Nazionale had answered in Rome, the Orientale in Venice.
The house was let furnished, and everything was in the third-rate French style inferior mahogany and cheap gilding, bare floors with gaudy little rugs lying about here and there, tables with flaming tapestry covers, chairs cushioned with red velvet of the commonest kind, sham tortoiseshell clock and candelabra on the dining-room chimney-piece, alabaster clock and candelabra in the drawing-room.
The cure was never insisted on with such an angry vehemence. Recovering from the first shock of this fierce noise, Macleod began to look around this strange place, with its magical colors and its profusion of gilding; but nowhere in the half-empty stalls or behind the lace curtains of the boxes could he make out the visitor of whom he was in search. Perhaps she was not coming, then?
The palace of the Seraglio, the cloister with marble pillars, the hall of the ambassadors, the impenetrable gate guarded by eunuchs and ichoglans, have a romantic look in print; but not so in reality. Most of the marble is wood, almost all the gilding is faded, the guards are shabby, the foolish perspectives painted on the walls are half cracked off. The place looks like Vauxhall in the daytime.
Candace had become familiar with the street side of the pretty Casino building, and admired greatly its long façade, with the quaintly shingled curves and balconies, and the low gables, ornamented with disks and half suns in dull gilding, all looking, Mrs. Gray said, as old as if it had stood there for a couple of centuries, instead of for three or four years only.
"A plague on it!" said Blount, as he descended the stairs; "had he sent me with a cartel to Leicester I think I should have done his errand indifferently well. But to go to our gracious Sovereign, before whom all words must be lacquered over either with gilding or with sugar, is such a confectionary matter as clean baffles my poor old English brain.
Content with the sphere of usefulness assigned her by Nature and Nature's God, viewing that sphere with the piercing eye of intellect, and gilding it with the beautiful colours of the imagination, she will cease the vain and almost impious attempt to wander from it.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking