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Updated: May 14, 2025
We were received by an old gentleman, who appeared to be a public officer, and found ourselves in a small room, wainscoted with beautifully carved oak, roofed with a coved ceiling, painted with symbols of the planets, and arabesqued in rich designs by Raphael, and lined with splendid frescos of subjects, scriptural and historical, by Perugino.
It was probably built by Sir Walter while he lived here in 1588-89, during the time of the great Armada; for it is a typical Elizabethan house, quaintly gabled, with charming Tudor windows, and delightfully wainscoted with richly carved black oak. A chimney-piece in the library where Sir John's aged mother received us most kindly and hospitably is a marvel of Elizabethan woodwork.
I went into the room, followed by the servant woman, and was amazed to find that it, like the one below, was wainscoted, and that nothing like drapery was to be found near the door. "Where is it," said I; "what has become of it?" "What does your ladyship wish to know?" said the old woman.
Into one of these solitary abodes I went alone, and closed the door upon myself and the ghosts. There was my workshop, where I carved wood; there the narrow staircase leading steeply up to my wainscoted bedroom, my study, and my oratory, with windows looking down into the leafy square of garden, planted by my own hands.
A man who had a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was being razed, the old building materials to use in the construction of her new home.
I opened a side-door, and entered a large room, where were, in a corner, some rusty and cobwebbed bird-cages, but nothing more. It was a wainscoted room, but a white mildew stained the panels. I looked from the window: it commanded that dismal, weed-choked quadrangle into which I had once looked from another window.
Spurring down the hill, the party were admitted, at the well-guarded gateway, into a large thickly-walled yard, where the soldiers and horses remained, and Berenger and Philip, passing through a small arched doorway into the body of the old monastery, were conducted to a great wainscoted hall, where a pulpit projecting from the wall, and some defaced emblematic ornaments, showed that this had once been the refectory, though guard-room appliances now occupied it.
Its central hall has a carved archway; most of the rooms have painted tiles and are wainscoted to the ceiling; the sashes are red-cedar, the great staircase mahogany; there are pilasters with delicate Corinthian capitals; there are cherubs' heads and wings that go astray and lose themselves in closets and behind glass doors; there are curling acanthus-leaves that cluster over shelves and ledges, and there are those graceful shell-patterns which one often sees on old furniture, but rarely in houses.
I am not sure, after all, that Verrio's frescoed grand staircase was not in another part of the palace; for I remember that we went from it through an immensely long suite of apartments, beginning with the Guard-chamber. All these rooms are wainscoted with oak, which looks new, being, I believe, of the date of King William's reign.
The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside: indeed, I never saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted parlour in which I spent the remainder of the evening. It was a short oblong in shape, save that the fireplace was built across one of the angles so as to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle was similarly truncated by a corner cupboard.
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