At Castle Hill are also several greyhounds; they are particularly lively and well modelled and suitable for their purpose as guards to the gates. Gate piers are most inviting pedestals for leaden imagery. At Albert Gate, Hyde Park, there are two beautiful lead stags--another pair of them are at Loughton in Essex; no more appropriate English park gate could well be thought of. At Carshalton, Surrey, where a park was enclosed by Thomas Scawen, the great gate pillars of the entrance have large boldly modelled statues of Diana and Actæon, the date 1726. The little Cupids that stand out of the ivy that covers the piers at Temple Dinsley are sketched in Fig. 53. [Illustration: FIG. 53.--Temple Dinsley.] Perhaps the finest gate pier groups are those to the Flower Pot Gate at Hampton Court, where Cupids uphold a basket of flowers. These able pieces of work are not generally known for lead, because, like so many figures and vases, they have been painted and sanded to imitate stone. [Illustration: FIG. 54.--Syon House.] In 1744 the then member for Southampton presented two lions for the Bar Gate in that town. These not very beautiful creatures still remain. Syon House, on the Thames, has besides the great lion, a lesser lion set over Adam’s “lace gateway,” weighing a ton and half, it is unfortunately newly _painted and sanded_ to look like stone, and as the tail sticks out in a way utterly impossible for anything but metal it makes it entirely absurd. There is a plague of paint over old leadwork, which should be gilt or let alone. [Illustration: FIG. 55.--Syon House.] On the park wall facing the road there are fine sphinxes, about five feet long, in every way different to the lion, well designed exercises in the “classic taste.” Well modelled, with impressive heads, in the dark and dinted metal, they are pleasant both in colour and texture. They are quite “Adam’s” in character but not at all petty like some of his work and very different to a pair of sphinxes also of lead, on the gates of Chiswick House. § XVII. OF FINIALS AND CRESTINGS. The lead finial is typically a French feature; there cannot be said to be a single instance of a large ornamental finial of lead remaining in England of the kind once so universal in France and of which so many still remain there. These French finials from the 12th to the 18th centuries have been sufficiently described, especially by M. De la Queriere, who devotes a volume to them and the cresting of ridges; by Viollet-le-Duc; and in De Caumont’s _Abcdaire_.