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The earliest specimen is a reading desk, presented by the Mikado, with a slope for a book much resembling an ordinary bookrest, but charmingly decorated with lacquer in landscape subjects on the flat surfaces, while the smaller parts are diapered with flowers and quatrefoils in relief of lac and gold. This is of the sixteenth century.
I wrote down hastily, and in their own course, the subjects of some of the quatrefoils of Lyons; of which I here give the reader the sequence: Elephant and castle; less graphic than the St. Zeno one. A huge head walking on two legs, turned backwards, hoofed; the head has a horn behind, with drapery over it, which ends in another head. A boar hunt; the boar under a tree, very spirited.
Through the great doors, which were of weathered oak thickly studded with nails, over which hung the family coat of arms, a shield, azure, three quatrefoils, argent, the girl and the old man passed across the paved courtyard, up a flight of steps to the terrace which led to the porch and from thence to the ante-hall passage.
At either extremity of this panel stands a figure censing the corpse with a circular thurible. The border of each compartment is formed by a double invected pattern of gold and enamel. The ridge-piece is of copper perforated with eight keyhole ornaments. The back of the shrine is also divided into two compartments, and is decorated with quatrefoils.
The ornate woodwork of the frame and casings, however, especially the frieze across the lintel, with its oval and elliptical fluted designs elaborately hand-tooled, suggests the Dutch influence of New York and New Jersey. The iron rails of the steps present an interesting instance of the adaptation of Gothic tracery, arches and quatrefoils.
On the gable above the door are two square panels, each containing a coat-of-arms set in a cusped quatrefoil, while the vine-leaves which fill in the surface between the quatrefoils and the outer mouldings of the square, as also those on the crowns which surmount the coats, are also quite English.
The stone base of the railings, with its many projecting angles and its band of delicate quatrefoils, is thought to have formed part of the shrine of St. Wilfrid, and, having been found in fragments, was placed here by Sir Gilbert Scott. In this aisle the sides of the windows are partially panelled.
Each of the four sides is pierced by two groups of coupled openings under superior arches, the several moulded members of which rise in four receding orders from the square abaci of the capitals of the angle shafts. The space between the pointed heads of the sub-arches on the east and west faces is pierced by quatrefoils; those on the west are different in design from those on the east.
Some dissatisfaction was felt, as the Fabric Rolls indicate, in 1379, when masons were employed to divide each of the large windows into two lights with a quatrefoil above. The mullions and quatrefoils remained till our own day, when they were removed by Sir Gilbert Scott, whose action the present state of expert opinion on restoration would severely condemn. =The Nave.
The only monument, strictly so called, of which there is any record, was a low table monument, raised on two shallow steps, with simple quatrefoils, carved in squares set diamond-wise. Engravings of this shew it to have been an insignificant and mean erection. A few slabs of it were lately found buried beneath the floor, and they are now placed against the wall of the aisle.
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