Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 4.djvu/315

 ENGLISH MEDIEVAL EMBROIDERY. 291 patterns, at Hardwick, are the common conventional designs of the day, a fact not only perceptible in her own handy works so profusely exhibited here, but also in their antitypes upon a cor- poras cloth belonging to a gentleman in the immediate neighbour- hood. We are unresistingly carried l)y the imagina- tion backwards to the period of Elizabeth, nay, we arc in truth walking among the characteristic features of the time, as we pass through the stately chambers of Hardwick, since every, or nearly every article of furni- ture is coeval with the construction of the edi- fice. Yet the owner of so fair a fabric suffered none of her energies to be distracted by the care necessary to see it appropriately garnished when built. She erected both houses and hospitals, sumptuously fitting up the one, and well en- dowing the other. The noble dwelling at Chatsworth, and the embattled walls of Bolsover, declare the princely outlay made from her fortune, and in a land of stone like Derbyshire her palaces and manors arose as rapidly as the creations of some imscen magician in oriental fable. Her zeal for architectiu*e was so. deeply rooted in her very nature that it was only extin- guishable with her existence. Hence it had been foretold by no very prophetic seer, in the language of metonymy, that she would live as long as she continued to build, and so it happened, for a wintry interru})tion to the works in progress, that fatal suspension of her labours, left Chatsworth unfinished, and at the age of eighty-seven carried her to the grave. Her dust lies imdcr a magnificent monument of marble in the church of All Hallows at Derby, which either from personal Antependium, in the possession of Mr. Bowdon.