BRASS LANTERN CLOCK.
Showing chains with weights and long pendulum.
Date, about 1700.
(At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)

The brass lantern clock illustrated (p. [55]) has chains and weights. It is a thirty-hour clock, with striking but no alarum movement. It has a short pendulum behind the back plate.

The use of an anchor-shaped pendulum brought a winged screen into fashion to conceal its movement. The example illustrated (p. [55]) shows this style. This also is a bracket clock with chains supporting the weights.

But the bracket clock did not stop at this stage. On the introduction of the long or seconds pendulum this new mechanism was embodied in brass clocks, and the illustration (p. [57]) of an example about 1700 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, shows this type. A fine brass lantern clock by Thomas Tompion is at the British Museum, an illustration of which is given (p. [61]).

Continuance of Manufacture in the Provinces.—Long after the long-case clock was in general use in London, the brass clock with weights and pendulum was extensively made in the provinces. Examples are found by local makers up to the early years of the nineteenth century. In a measure this continuance of an obsolete form is parallel with the village cabinet-maker's furniture. Generation after generation produced oak chairs and settles in Stuart form, and when Chippendale seized the world of fashion, it was not till long afterwards that village craftsmen made chairs in the Chippendale manner—but in yew, in beech, and in sycamore, never in mahogany. Even Sheraton's satinwood elegance in delicate tapered legs found an echo in elm and beech. It is such naïveté which is delightful to the collector, and in provincial clocks he will find a study equally rewarded by extraordinary anachronisms and singular adaptations within the compass of the local maker.

For instance, the marquetry of the village carpenter is always a hundred years behind the time. His engraving on dials is of the same character as that on his local coffin-plates or his tombstones. His painted dials often exhibit native touches difficult to equal.

Their Appeal to Collectors.—Anything that appeals to collectors, whether it be Morland's colour prints or Wheatley's Cries of London, old Sheffield plate, Stuart cane-back chairs or Sheraton tea-caddies, pays the usual tribute which the antique pays to posterity. As imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, a thousand replicas start up to supply a demand. The man of taste says that such and such a thing is unique in its art-appeal to him. The man of money seeks to prove that it is not unique and buys as many uniques and antiques as his distended banking account will allow. We find this applies to lantern clocks. Birmingham has turned out thousands of these brass clocks in replica of seventeenth-century styles. Sometimes as much as ten pounds is asked for them, and sometimes it is found that an old maker's name has been added to the dial. There is no particular harm in any man having replicas of fine old objects of art in his house if he likes the styles and cannot afford originals. But it is a pity that any one should ever pay more than replica price for a copy. That is foolishness, and outside the realm of collecting.