THAT wonderful doll’s house — no doll’s house really, but a model perfect in every detail of a house of our time — which is to be offered to the Queen will remain to witness to future generations how we lived. We wish that before they are all reconverted to the purposes a model of the same exactness might be made of some church in which our great-grandfathers worshipped, some in the decent comfort of a great pew, others, their even-Christians, but censurably poor, on severe benches under the gallery. Mr Maurice Hewlett has lately described such a church in Somerset, where earls in effigy with their chaste wives filled a side-chapel so full that its altar was crowded out, and yet could not contain all, so that there was an overspill of monuments into the nave and a splashing of the walls with tablets, and where “discreetly curtained off was a Holy of Holies, where the shining ones who survived worshipped their ancestors; a noble apartment, a withdrawing-room, with a stove, a couple of sofas, some club-chairs, and a deeply-padded elbow cushion. Magazines, an ash-tray, a match-stand — one missed them.” Another such pew we remember, not far west of Maidstone, with its own door through which, in more spacious days, a footman is said to have entered at the appropriate moment with the glass of sherry which enabled the squire to sustain the fatigues of the sermon. Models of such things as these might help Churchmen in time to come to understand what the Catholic revival has meant.

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