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Updated: June 17, 2025
However, after bribing the servants with half my worldly fortune, I was at last shewn into a spacious apartment, my letter being previously sent up for his lordship's inspection. During this anxious interval I had full time to look round me. Every thing was grand, and of happy contrivance: the paintings, the furniture, the gildings, petrified me with awe, and raised my idea of the owner.
"I should want a little fire for my glue-pot and polishing-iron. There will be gilding and lettering too, though I hope not much title-pieces to replace, and a touch here and there to give to the tooling! No man with any reverence in him would meddle much with such delicate, lovely old things as many of these gildings! He would not dare more than just touch them!"
In his interesting work, "Sylvia," published in 1661, Evelyn, in speaking of the noxious vapours poured out into the air by the increasing number of coal fires, writes, "This is that pernicious smoke which sullies all her glory, superinducing a sooty crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoiling movables, tarnishing the plate, gildings and furniture, and corroding the very iron bars and hardest stones with those piercing and acrimonious spirits which accompany its sulphur, and executing more in one year than the pure air of the country could effect in some hundreds."
They were of plaster run into moulds, or roughly carved in wood, and were colored with paint as glaring as the red and blue of a barber's pole, and covered with vulgar gildings. Chins in the air, ecstatic eyes shining with varnish, horribly ugly and all new, they were drawn up in line like recruits at the roll-call, the mitred bishop, the martyr carrying his palm, St. Agnes embracing her lamb, St.
Shouts of approbation succeeded each happy allusion to the national renown, and bravos, loud and oft-repeated, were the reward of the agents of the police, whenever they most administered to the self-delusion and vanity of their audience. In the meantime, gondolas rich in carvings and gildings, and containing females renowned for grace and beauty, began to cluster in hundreds around the port.
Darkness filled the church except at the main altar where many lights were shining, brightening the carvings and gildings. A monk, dressed in a chasuble, came from the vestry, bowed to the princess and commenced mass. Then the smoke from the fragrant incense arose, veiled the priest and the altar, and mounted in quiet clouds to the vaulted ceiling, increasing the solemn beauty of the church.
There in the opposite building were the windows of the beautiful "Hall of Truce," with its sumptuous carvings and gildings, its sculptures and portraits, where he had negotiated with the representatives of all the great powers of Christendom the famous Treaty which had suspended the war of forty years, and where he was wont almost daily to give audience to the envoys of the greatest sovereigns or the least significant states of Europe and Asia, all of whom had been ever solicitous of his approbation and support.
Marbles, carpets, gildings, silk hangings, pictures, and statues in fact, the whole mass of common-place luxuries as one sees them even in the grandest royal abodes, fell short of his magnificent pretensions.
This process is an exceedingly convenient one; it does away with danger from fire, and it leaves the gildings and metallic objects that chance to be in the room absolutely intact. Finally, the acid's power of penetration appears to be still greater than that which is obtained by the combustion of sulphur. It has but one drawback, and that is its high price.
Truly, no bad bargain. For my part, I would give my grand ambassadorial saloons, hangings, gildings, feasts, valets, ambassadors and all, for a bicoque in sight of the Thuilleries' towers, or my little cell in the Irlandois. "My last sheets have given you a pretty notion of our ambassador's public doings; now for a pretty piece of private scandal respecting that great man.
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