The ironwork of the early eighteenth century is one of its most remarkable productions. In England ironwork design seems to have burst suddenly into full splendour, without any gradual preparation. There are no elaborate specimens to be found throughout the seventeenth century until its close, nor are there any drawings by Thorpe, Smithson, Jones, or Webb, which lead one to suppose that they treated ironwork in any but the simplest way. But with the advent in 1689 of Jean Tijou, a native of France, who was probably brought over from the Netherlands by Queen Mary, consort of William III., the whole aspect was changed, and a school of clever blacksmiths grew up who filled the country, and more especially London and its suburbs, with beautiful bits of design in gates, fences, sign-boards, mace-holders in churches, balustrades of staircases, screens, and other objects where iron could be employed. Their work is marked by great judgment in varying the sizes of the iron bars and scrolls, by the variety and elaboration of the design, and by the judicious introduction of thin sheet iron, hammered and modelled into foliage or some heraldic device. The craftsmen seem to have known exactly how to handle their material so as to combine strength with lightness, vigour with delicacy, the open effect of scroll-work with the solid effect of foliage. The due mixture of the curved line with the straight, the growth of one from the other, the repetition of straight lines in suitable positions, all seem to have come to them by intuition which seldom erred. Of the immense amount of work which still survives, the proportion of weak, unmeaning, or ill-adapted design is infinitesimal. Something, no doubt, they owed to France, but they worked largely on their own lines, and established a school of design which is essentially English. [Illustration: FIG. 261.--The Martins, Chipping Campden, 1714.] [Illustration: FIG. 262.--Part of Iron Screen, Hampton Court Palace.] [Illustration: FIG. 263.--Iron Gateway, Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire.]