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Updated: May 14, 2025
"The mantelpieces in the drawing room.... "After dinner I will show you...." Dinner was announced. She tucked her hand under his arm. "Are you going to take me in to dinner, St. John?" "Of course," he smiled at her. The dining room was big enough to reduce the immense pieces of Georgian silver beautiful they were to reasonable proportions. St.
The ambition of these homes had been to resemble one another. What one had all must have. Under ordinary circumstances the powerful common instinct to resemble is pitiable. But here it was absolutely touching. Everything was in these parlours. The miserable, ugly ornaments, bought and cherished and admired by the simple, were on the mantelpieces.
Dropped books and baskets of knitting lay on bright carpets snowed under by fallen plaster. Vases of dead flowers stood on mantelpieces, ghostly stems and shrivelled brown leaves reflected in gilt-framed mirrors. I could hardly bear to look! It was like being shown by a hard-hearted surgeon the beating of a brain through the sawed hole in a man's skull.
Elegance of taste and fastidious research of ornament could do no more; but what is luxury to the mind ill at ease? or can a restless conscience be stilled by red Bohemian glass or pale Parian mantelpieces? No, alas! too plainly was this conspicuous when, on entering the library, we found Mr. Rochester alone! The envied possessor of all this opulence can be no happy man.
Out of this insensate hell come the impossible statues that grin about our cities. Here, cut by the most hideous machinery with a noise like the shrieking of iron on iron, the mantelpieces and washstands of every jerry-built house and obscene emporium of machine-made furniture are sawn out of the rock.
No longer was the flame fed by a backlog so huge that "a chain was attached to it, and it was dragged in by a horse." How far removed Westover was from the day of such things, is shown by the noted mantelpiece in the drawing-room. Only with the coming of smaller fireplaces came those elaborate mantelpieces.
Occasional marks of former elegance or splendour survive sometimes in the size of the rooms, sometimes in a little carved wood-work about the mantelpieces or wainscoatings of these mansions; but all things have a Castle Rackrent air of neglect, and dreary careless untidiness, with which the dirty bare-footed negro servants are in excellent keeping.
With a last, lingering hope, he searched upon the mantelpieces and tables of his rooms, on the chance of finding some letter left by George. "He may have slept here last night, and started for Southampton early this morning," he thought. "Mrs. Maloney has been here, very likely, to make everything tidy after him."
She went into every room, recognizing the almost invisible spots and marks on the hangings which had not been changed and again noting the odd forms and faces which the imagination so often traces in the designs of the furniture coverings, the carvings of mantelpieces and the shadows on soiled ceilings.
There were intricate carvings of the Sheraton and Chippendale periods, and there were the wonderful floral sprays, cherubs, and other ornaments so cunningly wrought by Grinling Gibbons and his followers. Wooden ornament in those days took the form of over-doors, and wreaths running down the lintels; and massive mantelpieces of oak were carved deeply.
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