The engraver's art progressed with the art of the period in which he lived, and in a collection of rubbings may be seen the gradual training of the eye and hand until from meaningless pictures without background or perspective the artist was able to engrave on metal a beautifully realistic picture of the subject he had chosen. As a guide to a few indications of the period to which brasses belong, it may be mentioned that the decorative canopies on monumental brasses belong chiefly to the ornate period of art. The embattled canopies and the change to the decorative Gothic tell of the progress in ecclesiastical architecture until it reached its height between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, later brasses telling of its gradual decadence. Of the variety of subject it would be impossible to refer, for at all ages there have been many who would fit into niches between the extremes of the early fighting men amidst the nobles and knights who fell in battle, and those who apparently lived all their lives in the peaceful rural surroundings of some quiet English village, dying within sight of the old church where they had worshipped, and where they were eventually buried. "When some proud son of man returns to earth, Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth, The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe, And storied urns record who rests below; When all is done, upon the tomb is seen, Not what he was, but what he should have been." Byron. VIII DOMESTIC UTENSILS CHAPTER VIII DOMESTIC UTENSILS The kitchen--The houseplace--Chimney and other ornaments--Classified arrangement.