What Lord Grimthorpe has said[3] about the dials of turret clocks applies in its principles to the dials of domestic clocks. "The figures are generally made much too large. People have a pattern dial painted; and if the figures are not as long as one-third of the radius, and therefore occupying, with the minutes, about two-thirds of the area of the dial, they fancy they are not large enough to be read at a distance; whereas the fact is, the more the dial is occupied by figures, the less distinct they are, and the more difficult it is to distinguish the position of the hands, which is what people want to see, and not to read the figures, which may very well be replaced by twelve large spots.... The rule which has been adopted, after various experiments, as the best for the proportions of the dial is this: Divide the radius into three, and leave the inner two-thirds clear and flat, and of some colour forming a strong contrast to the colour of the hands--black or dark blue if they are gilt, and white if they are black. The figures, if there are any, should occupy the next two-thirds of the remaining third, and the minutes be set in the remainder near the edge." [3] _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (ninth edition), vol. vi. =The Ornamentation of the Spandrel.=--There are some interesting types of ornamentation of the space between the hour circle and the square outlines of the dial. The neat filling of spandrels offered problems to the architect and woodworker long before the clockmaker found similar difficulties. It is not easy exactly to fill a triangle with a design that is pleasing. Some of the best examples are found in Italian lettering, old sixteenth-century woodcuts of the letter L. In English clocks, the spandrel in the lantern clock about 1670 had a plain cherub head, as simple in character as the fine pearwood carving from a Buckinghamshire church we illustrate of a slightly earlier period, still rich with unimpaired colour (p. 167). German clocks had this device of the cherub's head, but not in the spandrel. At the British Museum there is one example with this cherub-head as a base ornament at the foot of the clock, which rests on it. This is in date 1600. [Illustration: ENGLISH WOOD-CARVING. Painted and gilded. Early seventeenth century. (_In collection of author._)] [Illustration: BRASS SPANDREL. From dial of clock by Henry Massy (London), 1680, illustrated p. 159.] The design of the cherub with outspread wings was common enough in Italy, where children have served as models since Donatello. It became established as a form and was a favourite embellishment of the English stone-carver in the seventeenth century. Horace Walpole protested at its abuse by the contemporaries of Christopher Wren, and it can be found outside St. Paul's Cathedral and in many other London churches and over late Stuart doorways.