Page:An Encyclopædia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture.djvu/1121

 GOTHIC VILLA FURNITURE. 1097 SuBSECT. 5. Gothic FurnituTe for Bed-rooms. 2166. For Chairs, Tables, Chests of Drawers, and other common Bed-room Furniture, we have here given no designs, because any one at all conversant with the subject may easily confer a Gothic character on the different articles before given as modern furniture for the bed-rooms of cottages and villas. We are enabled by Mr. Lamb to give one Design for a bedstead, fig. 2022, which is sufficient to prove that there is no piece of modern furniture whatever to which this style may not be applied with admirable effect. We have seen a number of Gothic bedsteads executed imder the direction of the late Duke of Norfolk, in Arundel Castle ; but none of them are correct in regard to style, or at all to be compared with iNIr. Lamb's Design for splendour of general effect. Arundel Castle, our readers are probably aware, was for many years the scene of the late Duke of Nor- folk's trials at building ; by which, as his own Architect, he sought to instruct himself in the Gothic style. After being occupied in this way for upwards of forty years, and spending several hundred thousand pounds, he just arrived at last at that point where a man discovers his own utter ignorance. We make no reflection on the memory of the noble duke on this account, we merely state the fact. A man of overgrown wealth may be allowed to spend it in any way he pleases, as the greatest injury he can do society is to hoard it. Had the duke employed an Architect, he would, no doubt, have possessed a castle in a very superior taste, both externally and internally, to what Arundel Castle now is ; but it does not follow, on that account, that he would have been so happy in seeing the more perfect works of his Architect, as he was in realising the crude ideas of his own mind. These observations cannot be considered altogether irrelevant to a work of this kind, because they will serve to teach by example the consequences of a man's attempt- ing to be his own Architect, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the subject, to be aware of the precise state of his own architectural knowledge. 2167. Bemarks. For all the designs of Tudor furniture in the preceding subsections, we are indebted to Mr. Lamb ; whose mind is richly stored with all the forms both of modern and ancient Architecture, and whose pencil is as rapid and accurate as his con- ceptions are fertile. Mr. Lamb is one of the few yoimg Architects who, like Mr. Mallet, 6o