1313.—Font in East Dereham Church, Norfolkdetails

When shall we learn in England, the truth that one might have supposed was too evident to remain long unlearnt or unpractised, that he reverential care of all that is directly concerned with a great man’s life and history, is the best of all monuments to his memory? What piece of sculpture, though it be by a Chantrey or a Westmacott, and reared in the most magnificent of national mausoleums, even in Westminster Abbey itself, ever excited a tithe of interest that is felt on looking on the humblest relics of a man of genius in the spot where he was born, where he lived, or where he died? The first may teach us t othink of him, the second will most assuredly make us both think and feel with him. The font in question, we may add, though mutilated, has been evidently beautiful, and worthy of a time that abounded in exquisite pieces of sculpture, devoted to the same or similar purposes; let the reader look, for instance, at the font of East Dereham church, Norfolk (Fig. 1313), and the piscina (Fig. 1298, p. 349, where it has been accidentally mis-called a font). (p. 373)