Old Country Life

by S. Baring-Gould

Life is but a little span,

Full of painful thinking;

Let us live as fits a man,

No good liquors blinking!"

So sang our grandfathers; but the song has gone out with the polished table, and with the polished table the quiet enjoyable drinking of good port and sherry after the retirement of the ladies. The cigarette is lighted—and who can enjoy port with the air full of its perfumes?—and no sooner is the wine begun to be appreciated, than the tray of coffee is presented, dug into the side, as a reminder that now-a-days the pleasant hour with good wine and agreeable male companions is cut down to a quarter of an hour—has gone out of fashion, along with the polished table, and we must away into the drawing-room to talk empty nothingnesses, and listen to bad music.

But we must not spend too much time over tables and chairs. Marquetry became the fashion under William and Mary, when upright clocks, bureaux, and chairs were thus decorated. Under Louis XIV. a new style of decoration was introduced by one André Charles Buhl, who gave his name to it. He was chief upholsterer to the king, and his rich and brilliant marquetry of tortoise-shell and brass, so combined as to form figures and subjects, was extensively used in the furnishing of the new palace at Versailles.

The fashion extended to England, and where tortoise-shell was not employed, the ground was gilt, then painted over with black, leaving a pattern in gold uncovered, and the whole was washed over with a reddish-brown lacquer, which gave the effect of tortoise-shell. Spaces thus treated were relieved by raised work in wood carved and gilt in relief, in representation of Buhl's brass work. We find this chiefly in mirror and picture-frames.

Then followed the reign of Louis XV., the age of rococo, of shell-shaped curves set against each other back to back. It may have been barbarous, but it was rich and beautiful. Then walls were painted white and picked out with gold, the clearest, most brilliant, turquoise-blues and rose-carmines came in. Painters devoted themselves to the decoration of panels in the walls of rooms and to ceilings, the dessus-de-portes, over-doors, generally in chiaroscuro, shepherds and shepherdesses, nymphs, cherubs. There was a certain amount of sombreness in the old Elizabethan house, in the dark oak panelling, in the olive-greens of the tapestry, that was distasteful to the merry men of the epoch from Charles II. to the first Georges, and they set themselves to make their interiors as sparkling with gold and brilliant colour as possible on a white instead of a dark ground.