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Updated: September 4, 2025
Walls of enormous grandeur are developed or expanded without the few windows in them happening to impair their massiveness or diminish their strength. There are no flying buttresses; they are self-sustaining. Marble panels, alternately yellow and black, cover them with a glittering marquetry, and curves of arches let into their masses seem to be the bones of a robust skeleton beneath the skin.
But when her slippered feet were on a Persian rug and the displaced ringlets of her monster wig adjusted by the waiting abigail and smelling-salts put on a marquetry table nearby and the folds of the gown righted by the page-boy, Lady Kirke extended a hand to receive our compliments.
The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry , and a great old bed, with tapestry hangings.
A curtain of violet velvet, covering if necessary the large window, which looked upon a balcony full of flowers, and the umbrageous Park; an Axminster carpet, manufactured to harmonise both in colour and design with the rest of the chamber; a profusion of luxurious seats; a large table of ivory marquetry, bearing a carved silver bell which once belonged to a pope; a Naiad, whose golden urn served as an inkstand; some daggers that acted as paper cutters, and some French books just arrived; a group of beautiful vases recently released from an Egyptian tomb and ranged on a tripod of malachite: the portrait of a statesman, and the bust of an emperor, and a sparkling fire, were all circumstances which made the room both interesting and comfortable in which Sidonia welcomed Tancred and introduced him to a guest who had preceded him, Lord Henry Sydney.
After the Renaissance marquetry ran riot in France, but that is out of the province of our present study. The art of mosaic making has changed very little during the centuries. Nearly all the technical methods now used were known to the ancients.
The drawing-room, to the left, was dark and still and unsympathetic and expensive; a vista of brocade-covered French-gilt chairs and a marquetry table and a table of onyx top, on which was one book bound in ooze calf, and one vase; cream-colored heavy carpet and a crystal chandelier; fairly meretricious paintings of rocks, and thatched cottages, and ragged newsboys with faces like Daniel Webster, all of them in large gilt frames protected by shadow-boxes.
In the antechamber they found a provision of immense felt over-shoes which they were expected to put on for their passage over the waxed marquetry of the halls. These roomy slippers were designed for the accommodation of the native boots; and upon the mixed company of foreigners the effect was in the last degree humiliating.
The pantaloons or what, by courtesy, I called such, were a monument of careful and ingenious, but hopeless, patching, that should have called forth the admiration of a Florentine artist in mosaic. I have been shown in later years many table tops, ornamented in marquetry, inlaid with thousands of little bits of wood, cunningly arranged, and patiently joined together.
The list gives jewellery and marquetry or inlaid woodwork; feather-flowers, straw hats, lace and embroidery, the latter an important item; boots and shoes of unblackened leather; sweetmeats, especially guava-cheese; wax-fruits, soap-berry bracelets, and 'Job's tears; costumes in wood and clay; basketry, and the well-known wicker chairs, tables, and sofas.
"That's the reason," said Lalage, "why I refurnished your study and bought that perfectly sweet Dutch marquetry bureau and hung up the picture of Milton dictating 'Paradise Lost' to his two daughters." I have hated that picture since the day it first appeared in in my study. I only agreed to letting it in because I knew the alternative was Titherington's hospital nurse.
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