and clusters of grapes and pomegranates in festoons and clusters of monuments.  Vases upon pillars, the commandments in sky-blue, clouds carved out of wood supporting angels, are some of the ideas recommended.  Instead of a Norman font you can substitute one resembling a punch-bowl,[30] with the pedestal and legs of a round claw table; and it would be well to rear a massive pulpit in the centre of the chancel arch, hung with crimson and gold lace, with gilt chandeliers, large sounding-board with a vase at the top.  A stove is always necessary.  It can be placed in the centre of the chancel, and the stove-pipe can be carried through the upper part of the east window, and then by an elbow conveyed to the crest of the roof over the window, the cross being taken down to make room for the chimney.  Such are some of the recommendations of this ingenious writer, which are ably illustrated by effective drawings.  They are not all imaginative.  Many old churches tell the tragic story of their mutilation at the hands of a rector who has discovered Parker’s Glossary, knows nothing about art, but “does know what he likes,” advised by his wife who has visited some of the cathedrals, and by an architect who has been elaborately educated in the principles of Roman Renaissance, but who knows no more of Lombard, Byzantine, or Gothic art than he does of the dynasties of ancient Egypt.  When a church has fallen into the hands of such renovators and been heavily “restored,” if the ghost of one of its medieval builders came to view his work he would scarcely recognize it.  Well says Mr. Thomas Hardy:  “To restore the great carcases of mediaevalism in the remote nooks of western England seems a not less incongruous act than to set about renovating the adjoining crags themselves,” and well might he sigh over the destruction of the grand old tower of Endelstow Church and the erection of what the vicar called “a splendid tower, designed by a first-rate London man—­in the newest style of Gothic art and full of Christian feeling.”

  [30] A china punch-bowl was actually presented by Sir T. Drake to
  be used as a font at Woodbury, Devon.

The novelist’s remarks on “restoration” are most valuable:—­

“Entire destruction under the saving name has been effected on so gigantic a scale that the protection of structures, their being kept wind and weather-proof, counts as nothing in the balance.  Its enormous magnitude is realized by few who have not gone personally from parish to parish through a considerable district, and compared existing churches there with records, traditions, and memories of what they formerly were.  The shifting of old windows and other details irregularly spaced, and spacing them at exact distances, has been one process.  The deportation of the original chancel arch to an obscure nook and the insertion of a wider new one, to throw open the view of the choir, is a practice by no means extinct.  Next in turn to the re-designing