Studio: international art (82.1921)

THE ETCHINGS OF F. L. GRIGGS

building and, secondly, as a part of the
country in which it was placed ; a focus
of human joys and sorrows, a part of the
history and destiny of this little land which
is now our own and was our forefathers'.
He has not merely drawn the building
accurately and carefully ; he has known
and understood all that it has been and all
that it has suffered and endured. It was
originally, the work tells us, a religious
foundation, destined to comfort and assist
the labouring poor of the neighbourhood.
Then it was given, at the Dissolution, to
some Court rogue and sycophant, per-
verted to private and secular uses, and
enlarged, before our native architecture
had wholly succumbed to the Renaissance
pride and greed. But the building would
not—or could not—submit to the new
conditions. It was held by Dead Hands
which could not alienate. It remained a
" recusant " building, haunted by the past.
Now, the curse of sacrilege has over-

whelmed its spoilers. All this Mr. Griggs
has expressed, with outward calm, but with
suppressed passion, in his marvellous little
plate—a plate which might well have been
dedicated to the historian of sacrilege, old
Sir Henry Spelman. 000
We find the same thoughts and emotions
in Palace Farm, Priory Farm, and in other
plates, as in Mortmain. In them past and
present are bound together inextricably ;
there is a looking back wistfully to an
earlier and better and happier England ;
a treasuring of all that reminds us of our
wasted heritage, and a pained tense feeling
of our present misery. Mr. Griggs does
not rail at the present, nor weep over it;
but the joyous alacrity with which he turns
his back on it helps us to realise how much
it weighs upon him. One of the happiest
of his plates is St. Botolph's Bridge, in
which the present is forgotten. The
Cressett, The Ford, The Quay, and The
Minster, belong to the same series, in

"THE CRESSETT." BY
F. L. GRIGGS, R.E.

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