The Carriages (The Canvas One With Four Seats And The Chaise In
Which I Drove) Were Brought Suddenly Up To A Gate With The Royal
Arms Over It; And Here We Were Introduced To As Queer An Exhibition
As The Eye Has Often Looked On.
This was the state-carriage house,
where there is a museum of huge old tumble-down gilded coaches of
the last century, lying here, mouldy and dark, in a sort of limbo.
The gold has vanished from the great lumbering old wheels and
panels; the velvets are wofully tarnished.
When one thinks of the
patches and powder that have simpered out of those plate-glass
windows - the mitred bishops, the big-wigged marshals, the shovel-
hatted abbes which they have borne in their time - the human mind
becomes affected in no ordinary degree. Some human minds heave a
sigh for the glories of bygone days; while others, considering
rather the lies and humbug, the vice and servility, which went
framed and glazed and enshrined, creaking along in those old
Juggernaut cars, with fools worshipping under the wheels, console
themselves for the decay of institutions that may have been
splendid and costly, but were ponderous, clumsy, slow, and unfit
for daily wear. The guardian of these defunct old carriages tells
some prodigious fibs concerning them: he pointed out one carriage
that was six hundred years old in his calendar; but any connoisseur
in bric-a-brac can see it was built at Paris in the Regent Orleans'
time.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 17 of 240
Words from 4289 to 4540
of 65663
