e. The box-iron we engrave in Fig.
39 is one which has thus been given; it bears the monogram of the fair
lady who originally owned it, engraved within a "true lover's knot." The
cupidons of the handle ending in flowers may be an emblem of Love and
Hymen, forming an appropriate embellishment.

[Illustration: Fig. 39.]

CHAPTER III.

Applicability is the most useful characteristic of the style popularly
known as the Renaissance; it is confined to no one branch of art, but is
capable of extension to all, from the most delicate work of the jeweller
to the boldest scroll-ornament adopted by the sculptor in wood or stone.
The Loggie of the Vatican is the best original example of the style as
perfected by Raffaelle and his scholars, and applied to wall-painting.
It was a free rendering of the antique fresco ornament then just
discovered in the Baths of Petus, where extensive excavations were
undertaken in 1506, under the superintendence of the Papal authorities.
The classic forms were "severer" than those in use by the artists who
resuscitated the style, and were somewhat overlaid with ornament. The
details of Raffaelle's own work will not always bear adverse criticism,
inasmuch as there are heterogeneous features introduced occasionally,
which are not visible in the purer style of antiquity. As the fashion
for this decoration travelled northward, it increased in freedom from
classic rule, and more completely deserved the term "grotesque," which
it occasionally received, a term derived from _grotte_, an underground
room of the ancient baths, and which we now use chiefly in the sense of
a ludicrous composition. Such compositions were not unfrequent on the
walls of Greek and Roman buildings; and the German and Flemish artists,
with a nationally characteristic love of whimsical design, occasionally
ran riot in invention, having no rule beyond individual caprice. This
unfortunate position offering too great a licence to mere whimsicality,
was felt in ancient as well as in modern times. Pliny objected, on the
grounds of false or incongruous taste, to the arabesques of Pompeii,
though they approached nearer to the Greek model; and Vitruvius, with
that purity of taste which was his grand characteristic, endorsed the
opinion, and enforced it in his teaching. We are often in error when we
blindly admire, or unhesitatingly adopt, the works of the ancients as
perfection. In Athens and Rome in past time, as in Paris and London at
pr