spots and
stripes and dapples, scatters daisies on the grass and snowflakes in the
air, and powders over with chessboard chequers and lacings and "oes and
eyes of light," the wings of butterflies and birds.

So man has always loved to work when he has been let to choose, and when
nature has had her way. Such is the delightful art of the basket and
grass-cloth weaver of the Southern seas; of the ancient Cyprian potter,
the Scandinavian and the Celt. It never dies; and in some quiet,
merciful time of academical neglect it crops up again. Such is the,
often delightful, "builders-glazing" of the "carpenters-Gothic" period,
or earlier, when the south transept window at Canterbury, and the east
and west windows at Cirencester, and many such like, were rearranged
with old materials and new by rule of thumb and just as the glazier
"thought he would." Heaven send us nothing worse done through too much
learning! I daresay he shouldn't have done it; but as it came to him to
do, as, probably, he was ordered to do it, we may be glad he did it just
so. In the Canterbury window, for instance, no doubt much of the old
glass never belonged to that particular window; it may have been,
sinfully, brought there from windows where it did belong. At Cirencester
there are numbers of bits of canopy and so forth, delightful
fifteenth-century work, exquisitely beautiful, put in as best they could
be; no doubt from some mutilated window where the figures had been
destroyed--for, if my memory serves me, most of them have no figures
beneath--and surrounded by little chequered work, and stripes and
banding of the glaziers' own fancy. A modern restorer would have
delighted to supply sham-antique saints for them, imitating
fifteenth-century work (and deceiving nobody), and to complete the
mutilated canopies by careful matching, making the window entirely
correct and uninteresting and lifeless and accomplished and forbidding.
The very blue-bottles would be afraid to buzz against it; whereas here,
in the old church, with the flavour of sincerity and simplicity around
them, at one with the old carving and the spirit of the old time, they
glitter with fresh feeling, and hang there, new and old together,
breaking sunlight; irresponsible, absurd, and delightful.

CHAPTER XV

A Few Little Dodges--A Clumsy Tool--A Substitute--A Glass Rack--An
Inconvenient Easel--A Convenient Easel--A Waxing-up Tool--An Easel
with Movable Plates--Making