Studio: international art (16.1899)

A Nineteenth-Century House

PALACE GATE HOUSE : THE CEDAR BEDROOM LOOKING WEST

years. A stranger cannot look upon the cunning the laurel twisted round it, their names are written

andirons here without itching to use them in a together, with those of Addison, Cobbett, and

way men have whether the fire wants mending or Thackeray—names that belong to Kensington, and

not. are worthy of the bit of bay that is figured beside

The room is oblong with a bay window shut them. Opposite stand the names of Leech, Leighton,

off from it at night by embroidered curtains on a and Millais, in a laurelled shield which shows a

grey-blue ground; they show a pair of glorious painter's palette. In the centre (for the window

eagles, matched in deadly fight with serpents whose looks in this direction) stands Kensington Palace

powerful bodies twist about the trunk of a tree, itself, amongst tall trees—"A palace in a garden,

Mr. Cook, in designing this battle royal, falls meet scene for youth and innocence and beauty," *

into no error of mere naturalism ; but no one can as the legend runs beneath it, and on each side

look at his curtains without seeing that he has groups of tulips and iris—Dutch flowers of a

somewhere watched the muscular bodies of lithe Dutch house—give lovely spots of colour,
snakes moving amongst the branches, and studied A "V.R." and a crown, with the date 1837,

to some purpose the wear and tear of the feathers commemorate the Queen's accession, and the

of great birds. "V.R.I." with the Imperial crown commemorate

By day these curtains are drawn, and with the the long reign of sixty years, while the " 1897 "

light of the sun the room is seen to have new serves also to mark the date of the new house in a

interests. Mr. Whall, who "preaches in crazie stately manner. In the lower range the personal

brittle glasse," has made it what John Bunyan associations, surroundings, interests, pleasures, and

would have called a " significant room." Palace duties of man are symbolised—the things which

Gate House is in Kensington, and Kensington has enter into his daily life, the things of heaven and

many spacious memories worth recording. The earth, travel and citizenship.

very house that was pulled down, to be built up In the centre come the four Elements and the

anew by Mr. Cooper, was the home of John Foster, things that therein are.

and here, where the new dining-room stands, was On the left a globe with dim continents sym-
the library in which he wrote the " Life of Charles

Dickens." In the highest shield to the left, with * Disraeli's " Sybil."