Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/330

 268 NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s.ix. OCT. 1,1021. Payd George More the glazier for worke att Church 00 01 09 Payd to mr Thomas Wills for the keeping of the Lights att Orefordnesse for one quarter of a yeare due at michaeltide 1649 some is 20 00 00 Payd mr Richard Browne then that he layd out for two quier of paper Royall for the Ordnance 00 02 00 Payd John Cooper for killing monies in the marshe 32 at 3d p moule. . . . 00 08 00 payd *John Cooper more for killing 36 moules 00 09 00 ARTHUR T. WINN. Aldeburgh, Suffolk. GLASS-PAINTERS OF YORK. (See 12 S. viii. 127, 323, 364, 406, 442, 485 ; ix. 21, 61, 103, 163, 204, 245 .) HENRY GYLES (continued}. GYLES had a good friend and patron in Ralph Thoresby, the Leeds antiquary (1658- 1725), who, in his Diary and Correspondence, tells us that in June, 1702, whilst on one of his frequent visits to York, he had been in the morning to Mr. Gyles to see the noble window he had painted most exquisitely for Denton Hall, whilst in the evening he had on his hands a parcel of artists with whom he sat up full too late. His guests, he says, included Mr. Gyles, " the famousest painter of glass perhaps in the world," and his nephew, Mr. Smith the bell-founder, Mr. Carpenter the statuary, and Mr. Etty the painter.* Coming of a family of two or more generations of weaklings, few of whom survived their infancy his father was born shortly after the great pestilence of 1604, when over 3,500 people died in York, and his grandfather Nicholas the year after the visitation of 1550 Gyles probably inherited a feeble constitu- tion. Towards the end of his life he com- plains bitterly of his infirmities, the gout, stone and strangury being all at once upon him, whilst on another occasion he tells us " from my bed to my chair is the farthest of my travels." Although in his will he refers to the partner of his joys and sorrows as his " dear wife," she does not seem to have been much of a comfort to him, for, congratulating Thoresby on his marriage, he says : " I am of York, the Academician. Thcresby's friend, Mr. Etty, though styled a carpenter on his tombstone in All Saints' Church, North Street, York (he died in 1709, the same year as Gyles), was what is now- adays called an architect. Thoresby states that Grinling Gibbons worked in York ith Et.y for some years. (Davies,' Walks Through York,' p. 191,) glad to hear so good a character of your good wife, but a certain gentleman gave mine a far different one, saying Job's wife was an angel to her." When visitors called upon him she would send them away, and on one of these occasions he tells us that if he could have used his legs he would have followed them and never returned again. Added to these troubles was that of poverty. His work met with unstinted praise but little monetary reward. As pre- viously stated, his window at Denton was pronounced by his contemporaries to be i; the noblest painted glass window in the North of England," and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had sent " a noble Queen's arms of ten feet broad," assured him that *' it was highly approved of and looked upon as a very curious ornament of the College and far beyond anything they had seen done in glass -painting." After being something cheered in August, 1707, by receiving a nattering description of one of his works, he wrote to Thoresby : " Alack ! Sir, what avails it to have a man's labours praised if the reward for them will not keep him from want ? " On Jan. 10, 1707/8, he tells Thoresby of his difficulty in collecting the money due to him for his work at Cambridge: ' k I am, I fear, like to be a great loser by that Univer- sity ; but by Oxford three times more at Wadham College, which [what] startles me [is] that those which should be the chief support of science should be retrograde to it." No wonder he was driven to exclaim in another of his letters, " Masters of art ? No greater enemies to art ! " This sweeping condemnation cannot, however, have applied to University College, to which, in return for their patronage, Gyles presented a window and sundial bearing the inscription : "In per- petuam gratitudinis et observantiae memor- iam Magistro et Sociis celeberrimi hujus Collegii Henricus Giles de Civitate Eboraci hanc Fenestram pinxit et humillime ob- tulit " (Antony Wood, ' Hist, and Antiq. Univ. of Oxford,' ed. 1786, p. 237, Appen.). He tried to sell his house on Micklegate Hill, as he tells Thoresby in a letter dated August, 1707, in which he says: " Captain Robert Fairfax " (of Steeton, a captain in the Navy, afterwards Lord Mayor in 1715), " the sea-captain, and his wife came yesterday to see my house, and asked if I would sell it. I told them I should be very glad to do it and," he adds, with a touch I that shows he was not without a trace of
 * He is not to be confounded with William Etty