Page:The castellated and domestic architecture of Scotland from the twelfth to the eighteenth century (1887) - Volume 2.djvu/552

FOURTH PERIOD 536 MORAY HOUSE The south room is very beautiful, and remains with its pictured walls, carved wood-work, and delicately moulded marble chimney-piece quite intact. The ceiling of the turret staircase adjoining (Fig. 957) is also ornamented in plaster. The newel is continued as a wooden column, and from its capital springs the radiating roof. The gateway shown in Fig. 958 is all that remains to tell of the vanished glories of Moray House garden. FIG. 958. Moray House. Gateway in Garden. The exact year of the erection of Moray House seems not to be known, being variously stated as 1618 and 1628, but it is well ascer- tained to have been built by Mary, Dowager Countess of Home, the wife of Alexander, first Earl of Home, and daughter of Edward, Lord Dudley. Her initials, surmounted with a coronet, may still be seen in the south gable (Fig. 954) in the tympanum of the centre window already referred to as having opened out on the balcony. On the corresponding window to the Canongate, Daniel Wilson informs us, " are the lions of Home and Dudley impaled on a lozenge." This cannot now be easily made out from the street. In Chambers s Edinburgh Journal, vol. v. p. 415, it is stated that on her