[Illustration: MANTELPIECE STOKESAY CASTLE] Another distinguishing motive of shield-work,--the cartouch--is simply what its name implies, the representation of the armorial shield with its supports. The supports were pierced in every conceivable manner with circles, lozenges, crescents and all sorts of openings. "The Elizabethan, pure and simple," writes Mrs. Spofford, "has this strap-work sometimes finished off with slight scrolls--'foliages,' the Italians called them--and associated with some classical ideas not yet very exclusively or carefully managed; straps appearing well riveted to the middle of classic ornaments, and antique shapes rising, from the curious Renaissance pilaster, which was neither a vase nor a pilaster, in truth, broken as it is half way by the rising shape, like those of the Termae, with which the ancients made their boundaries sacred, smaller at the base than anywhere else, and bearing straps, arabesques and rosettes on its face." You will sometimes find an Elizabethan chimney-piece, the fluted and channelled columns, and the entablature of which are almost quite pure in style, and yet, almost invariably, somewhere about their length strap-ornament is sure to be introduced. [Illustration: PLATE XXXIII "FARM HOUSE," PETIT TRIANON] With the accession of James I. to the English throne a new influx of foreign influence made fresh havoc with such Gothic as remained. The shield, which, through a preference for the strap had been but sparsely used in the preceding reign, came now to be the centre of all decoration, and was lavished everywhere in a wild whirl of flourishing curves, together with the previously common straps and buckles and general tackle of war. Its universal use gave a somewhat less interesting air to the decoration than when the purer interlacing of the strap, with but here and there the convolutions of the shield, supplied its place. [Illustration: MANTELPIECE WRAXHALL MANOR] But the Jacobean by no means contented itself with this simpler form of the Renaissance. In other characteristics it tended more and more to the Classic, though never arriving at purity. In construction, the horizontal of the antique mingled with the vertical of the mediæval, and a volute upheld the pointed arch; in ornament, the Tudor leaf with a Grecian frieze, with other equally inappropriate arrangements. It was not for a hundred years thereafter that pure Classic came to be understood in England. The scallop shell seems, at this period, to have caught the fancy of the designers as a motive, and they used it at every turn. These shell forms and the shell in decoration disputed with cartouch and straps, with rosette and scroll, with the fabulous griffins, and with grotesque mermaids, whose tails, turning into scrolls, are seen dividing to the right and left in the ornamentation of Jacobean furniture and chimney-pieces. [Illustration: MANTELPIECE WRAXHALL MANOR]