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with little flowers and figures in the intervals. These must, I think, have come from a dado. The little figure on one of the pieces is now broken, but a sketch by Fairholt in the Victoria and Albert Museum shows it complete with a level band at the top. It is so engraved by Thomas Wright, and I think that part must have been broken off since it was drawn rather than that the drawing was restored. Wright says that these fragments were from a large building near Crosby Square. This pattern is on a fine red ground.
At the Guildhall Museum is a piece which is fortunately larger than ordinary, and allows for the pattern to be restored (Fig. [114]). The ground was covered with circles, small and great, the latter containing sprigs of flowers, all on a dark ground. This, I suppose, was also from a dado. The larger outer circle is made up of curious forms, which comparison shows were rose-petals. A fragment found in the Lombard Street excavations of 1785, of which there is a drawing in the Guildhall Library, shows segment of two circles, one within the other, red on bright blue, and apparently part of a powdering of small double circles. In the cloister of Lincoln Cathedral there used to be preserved, or at least kept, a large piece of a dado having a big rhombus with Amazon-shield forms at the ends, set within a long rectangular panel; this was of good workmanship and possibly of the second century.
Fig. 114.
Foliage.—In the London Museum is a morsel of pilaster, about as big as an open hand, having small leafage painted on a brown-red ground. The leaves are sharp and struck in in a masterly way; it is really beautiful (Fig. [115]). The leaves spread from a central stem or line, and it is a part of a suspended festoon, I think, rather than of a growth of foliage. This must be the fragment found in Southwark. “The débris of Roman villas, with pavements, ornamental bowls, and pieces of painted plaster have been found. One of these last, in Mr. Syers Cuming’s museum, has on it a slender stem with green leaves on a dull red field” (Mrs. E. Boger, Southwark, 1895. Mr. Cuming was a well-known antiquary).
Fig. 115.
In the British Museum are, as said above, two fragments of a scheme of decoration, which seems to have consisted of festoons hanging from slender uprights (6 and 7, Fig. [a]104]). Fig. [a]116], from the Guildhall, is, I suppose, a variety of vertical stem, but it may be part of a festoon.