Jasper County Democrat, Volume 2, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1900 — ODDITIES IN STAINED GLASS. [ARTICLE]

ODDITIES IN STAINED GLASS.

Carton* Features in the Decoration of Various Churches. The appearance of the Evil One in stained glass is probably one of the most unexpected apparitions that was ever allowed to figure in a religious edifice; but St. Mary’s church* at Stamford formerly possessed a window, some two centuries old, in which the enemy, of mankind, with tail and talons, and all other appurtenances complete, was figured in the act of flying away with a church. At Fairford church, Gloucester, which boasts of some glass inferior to that of King's college, Cambridge, only, there is represented in one of the windows a demon with a blue tail, accompanied by a companion who plays upon a fiddle, who is wheeling a woman away in a barrow to a certain place in-which they are more at home than their passenger desires to be. In the east window of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, which represents the crucifixion, the devil, in the shape of a dragon, is represented carrying off the soul of the wicked thief. This remarkable window was a present from the magistrates of Dordt to Henry VII., and does, indeed* show in one of its compartments his eldest son, Arthur, prince of Wales, and the latter’s bride, Catherine of Aragon, who was afterwards married to Henry VIII., and divorced by him. The window was given by the eighth Harry, who after the divorce had no further use for it, to Waltham Abbey, and after passing through a variety of hands and into a number of stone traceries was sold by Mr. Conyers, of Copt hall, Essex, in 1768, to the parish of St. Margaret’s for the sum of 400 guineas. It is noteworthy that Mr. Pierson, one of the overseers of the parish in 1766, was elected church warden for seven successive years, pending a suit in the ecclesiastical courts against the parish for setting up this window, which was alleged+o contain certain figures that should not be exhibited in church, an indictment that the court did not uphold. In a window representing the crucifixion at Fairford we find that the artist, not to be beaten by Tintoretto and his strangely armed Israelites, has provided Pilate with a fifteenth-cen-tury knight and a man at arms bearingaLochaberax and the motto “Juge san besoin,” an anachronism at which even a Plymouthian can afford to smile.

The east end church that has perpetuated the features of a number of modem statesmen in its carvings is not, strangely enough, unique in this respect, for the church at Elham, in the neighborhood of Hythe, boasts of a window containing excellent likenesses of three prime ministers of the present reign—tlie earl of Beaconsfield, Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone and the marquess of Salisbury. The design in which the three ministers appear possesses no political significance, but represents David before King Saul and his counselors; the marquess, the earl and the right honorable gentleman aforementioned appear as the counselors; the king bears the features of Thomas Carlvle, while in David the observer immediately recognizes the face of that sweet singer, Mme. Patti. This idea of perpetuating the features of modern politicians in stained glass is a good-hu-mored adaptation of Verrio’s method of.revcnging himself upon people he disliked; at Chatsworth, for instance, he perpetuated the features of a dean and bishop who had incurred his ire in the “Mars and Venus” series—the former unfortunate prelate appearing as Bacchus bestridingabarrel;andon another occasion he “got even” with his housekeeper, with whom he had quarreled, by borrowing her face for one of the Furies!—London Standard.