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We still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, their fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their castellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint mazes, its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque shapes in hopeless rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South.
A quarter of a mile away in the park, an incredibly picturesque house of red brick, with an ancient turreted gate-house, innumerable brick chimney-stacks, gables, mullioned windows, and oriels, rising from great sprawling box-trees and yews. By a stroke of fortune, the young kindly squire was coming out at the gate as I stood gazing, and asked me if I would care to look round.
Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows the south and east oriels are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising. We saw the tomb of Michael Scott, of King Alexander II, and that of the Douglas, marked with a sword. The heart of Bruce is supposed to have been buried beneath the high altar.
Sheldon's small domain was called The Lawn, and consisted of something over half an acre of flower-garden and shrubbery, a two-stall stable and coach-house, a conservatory and fernery, and a moderate-sized house in the gothic or mediaeval style, with mullioned windows in the dining-room and oriels in the best bedroom, and with a great deal of unnecessary stone-work and wooden excrescence in every direction.
As touching our house, it was four stories high, and with seven windows in every story; with well devised oriels at the corners, and pointed turrets on the roof. The gables were on the street, in three steps; over the great house door there was our coat of arms, the three links of the Schopppes and the fool's head with cap and bells as a crest on the top of the casque.
Besides, they have no business except with the most aristocratic persons, such as uncle de Courcy, and the Marquis of Kensington Gore, and that sort. I mention the marquis, because Mr Mortimer Gazebee is there now. And I know that one of the Gumptions was once in Parliament; and I don't think that any of the Oriels ever were.
Who does not remember, as one of his most delightful recollections of England, delightful as all his recollections of that dear old Mother-land are, if he has really seen her, who does not thus remember the drive from the little country town to the old family place, up the long avenue under its ancestral trees, the ferny brook crossed by the stone bridge with its carved balustrade, the deer feeding on the green slope of the open park or lying under some secular oak, the heavy white clouds casting their slow shadows on the broad lawn, the dark spreading cedars of Lebanon standing on the edge of the bright flower-garden, the old house itself, with its quaint gables and oriels, the broad flight of steps leading to the wide door, the cheerful reception from the prim, but good-natured housekeeper, her pride in the great hall, and in the pleasant, home-like rooms, in Vandyck's portrait of the beautiful countess, and in Holbein's of the fifth earl, the satisfaction with which she would point to the pictures and the marbles brought two centuries ago from Italy, now stopping before this to tell you that "it is considered a very improportionable Virgin by Parmigianino," and calling you to observe this old statue "of a couching Silenius wrapped in the skin of a Pantheon," and then, when the Rubens, and the Claude, and all the other pictures have been seen, her letting you pass, as a great favor, through the library with its well-filled oaken shelves, the gilding worn off the backs of many of its books by the love of successive generations; who does not remember such scenes as these, and recall the glorious pictures from Florence, or from Venice, or from Antwerp, that enrich many an English country home?
The best windows for outlook are, of course, oriels and bow windows, but these are not to be considered under the head of apertures merely; they are either balconies roofed and glazed, and to be considered under the head of external appliances, or they are each a story of an external semi-tower, having true aperture windows on each side of it. Inlet windows.
His first design was on Benares, a city which in wealth, population, dignity, and sanctity, was among the foremost of Asia. It was commonly believed that half a million of human beings was crowded into that labyrinth of lofty alleys, rich with shrines, and minarets, and balconies, and carved oriels, to which the sacred apes clung by hundreds.
Sheltered by the thick and verdant arch, a thousand birds salute the splendid evening with songs and circlings; red and green parrots climb, by help of their hooked beaks, to the top of pink-blossomed acacias; large Morea birds of the finest and richest blue, whose throats and long tails change in the light to a golden brown, are chasing the prince oriels, clothed in their glossy feathers of black and orange; Kolo doves, of a changeable violet hue, are gently cooing by the side of the birds of paradise, in whose brilliant plumage are mingled the prismatic colors of the emerald and ruby, the topaz and sapphire.
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