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was plenty of spare space to move about in; by pushing back the table one could dance or play games, as we often did, without fear of coming in contact with rickety tables laden with trumpery china; then the marble chimneypieces were wash.

Truly I remember the hideous dining and drawing room in which, when I was young, we ate, and sat, and read, and worked, and wrote. I was then, as I am now, one of what may be described as the fairly-well-off middle class, of that class which has supplied India with brave sol-able, not being dressed in grimy velvet diers and great legislators, and has furnished our own country with some good and some bad lawyers and priests and doctors, of that class whose fathers and friends fought in the Peninsula and on the high seas, voted on all occasions for Church and State, and loyally wore mourning for kings and queens.

or lace, a thing only bearable in countries where wood alone is burnt and where coal dust is unknown; Macassar was in its infancy, and antimacassars were not. Such rooms too were easily cleaned.

We keep no more servants now than we did then, and a small household now, Our dining-room, in those old days as then, commonly consists of cook, housewhen George IV. was king, contained maid, and footman or parlor maid. To twelve mahogany chairs, the seats cov- clean a room filled with furniture and ered with black horsehair cloth, two arm nicknacks would take the greater part of (not easy) chairs, a sofa to match, a din- a long day; and in what is called, or ing table dark with age and polished by wishes to be considered, an æsthetic house sheer labor to the smoothness of a mirror, the nicknacks pervade not only the drawa capacious sideboard, and a cellarette. ing-room, but overflow into all the bed. The Brussels carpet had been so good rooms. We see occasionally, in journals that it had faded in all its thickness to intended particularly for women, articles what are now called æsthetic colors. lecturing them for not doing more in their There was a rug to match; and the win-own houses, and recommending them to dow curtains were red damasked mo- wash the china, help make the beds, and assist in all the light household work; but life is now far more full of interests and social duties than it ever was before. No mistress of such a house, supposing she has any family, can, with all the good will in the world, neglect the claims upon her time peculiar to our age, in order to follow this advice. So thorough cleanliness in over-bedizened rooms of small households there cannot be.

reen.

On the mantelpiece were two French bronze branch candlesticks we did not call them candelabra then and two very good Japanese figures. A series of proof prints after Hogarth hung on the red, flock-papered walls.

But the greatest of all the advantages of an old-fashioned room was the absence of mere prettiness. For from modern prettiness real art is now suffering; and it is exactly our class that is stifling, drowning, burying art, and outraging taste by cheap ornamentation of all things and all places in our small houses.

The drawing-room was very little more furnished, but there the chairs were cov ered with blue-striped moreen, and there were two easy ones and two worked ones not easy, a large, comfortable sofa, a round table, a card or whist table, and a fairly good piano in a mahogany case, though the rest of the furniture was rosewood. Nobody seemed to think much about the furniture except my mother, who occasionally regretted that the curtains were drab and did not match the chairs. They In lordly mansions there is room for were rather handsome and bad been given everything. It is one of the missions of or left to her, and no idea of superseding the rich to encourage art, and it is a mis. them by anything more suitable eversion that our men of leisure and cultivacrossed her mind. The carpet was a frightful combination of large flowers and stiff scrolls. On the walls there hung a picture by Morland, two small copies after Paul Potter, and a family portrait by LawOn the chimneypiece was some very good porcelain, brought by a brother from the then far East, and two lustre candlesticks. I confess there was not much to please or interest in the fittings of those rooms. But they had their redeeming advantages. In the first place, there

rence.

tion have always fulfilled. In their houses they have space and appropriate places for what is pretty as well as for what is beautiful. And a fair measure of such things we too may enjoy. I do not desire to fall back upon hideousness. I do not yearn for the horrid furniture I was happy amongst years ago. I delight in a wellpainted cup and saucer, a piece of good embroidery, well-executed wood-carving, in all pretty things for themselves; but why in the name of common sense should

we who are not rich, who have not room, | be done? Surely not by a housemaid in sacrifice our limited space, our comfort, a hurry. and the possibility of cleanliness, by pour ing into a small house as many things as if we had a palace to disperse them over? Why diminish any area large enough for one stout person to pass through comfortably by placing there some unsteady table with a flower-pot, or a portfolio stand with photographs, or any other object the safety of which is endangered by every one who goes by? Quality is sacrificed to quantity, the fitness of things to prettiness.

But my hostess came in, and after some talk of our friends in Egypt, and of the latest railway accident, afternoon tea was called for. There were in this room, twenty-three feet long by twenty wide, no less than six tables of various kinds and two marble consoles, but no place to hold the tea equipage, for which another small table was now brought in. As one or two more friends arrived more cups were called for, and there was a struggle, as each was used and done with, to find room to put it down. Mine I lodged between the clock and the other things on the crowded mantelpiece, where on an ordinary survey it made no appreciable difference, and where probably it would not be perceived by the hurried parlor maid. I know this has often happened in my own house, for I confess that in these matters I also have sinned.

I again repeat that it is for none but well-to-do people with but a small amount of leisure, house-room, and spare cash, that I write. Neither to those above nor to those below us in fortune would my remarks apply. A cheap chromolitho graph in a workingman's home is a great improvement on the ugly prints of Black

I was lately left alone for half an hour in the drawing-room of a friend while she was finishing her correspondence, and I used the occasion to take stock of some of the innumerable trifles standing, lying, or hanging around, among which I had steered my way to an easy-chair. There stood on the table by which I had seated myself a painting of flowers and butter. flies done on a mirror. It was well done, and in itself pretty, but surely for a painting a mirror is a most inappropriate and hard material turned to a use which destroys its own raison d'être. Granted that a border of flat conventional flowers may be used to adorn the edges of a looking-glass, can anything be less artistic than one nearly covered over with paint-eyed Susan, or the coarse likenesses of ing, round the edges, or amongst the colors on which, we see, when we look at it, bits of our own face? "The newest thing in ware" next caught my eye; flower vases, on the surface of which were modelled huge flowers in high relief and natural colors, the whole blossoms only attached to the body of the ware by their stalks or leaves. Ingeniously and beautifully modelled they were, but surely in such a place they were a violation of all art fitness. Vases like these are made to As I walked home from my visit to the hold flowers, and flowers do not grow on friend whose drawing-room I have dethem. The juxtaposition of the real flow-scribed, I mentally resolved to carry out ers and the modelled ones was disagreeable. Think too of their potentiality for dust-collecting! Then I glanced at the Dresden candlesticks, and noticed that each candlestick seemed to be growing out of a rose. But they were only china roses with a hole in the middle, doing duty for bobêches or candle saucers; and very effectually they had done it, for the wax or "palmitine" had lodged between the leaves of each rose; but who was to clean it out? and how, without breaking the thin, delicately tinted china, could it

Wellington and Nelson, daubed over with blue and red and yellow, that adorned the walls of cottages in my childhood. But in our rooms are many cheap photographs better than one good line engraving? Are not a hundred articles of second-rate china much more in the way of comfort and cleanliness than the two or three heirlooms of porcelain treasured up by our mothers, and are they not, moreover, destructive of all discrimination in art?

the "putting away" I had already begun in a much more wholesale manner, to beware in future of what was " rather pretty," to avoid as so many snares bits of looking glass framed in velvet, any superabundance of antimacassars, cheap Jap anese toys, flower vases that will not hold flowers, and cups and saucers not meant to be drunk out of. I am looking for a housemaid, and I trust that the aspect of my reformed drawing-room may encourage some promising applicant to undertake to do her work without assistance.

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For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co.

Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

CARDINAL NEWMAN AND GENERAL

GORDON.

[A COPY of Cardinal Newman's poem, "The Dream of Gerontius," was given by General Gordon to Frank Power at Khartoum, February 18th, 1884. Deep, incisive pencil-marks had been drawn by Gordon under certain lines, almost all of which name death and cry for the prayers of friends:

Pray for me, oh! my friends!

'Tis Death, 'tis he. So pray for me,
My friends, who have not strength
To pray! Now that the hour
Has come, my fear is fled.

With other passages, all bearing on the supreme moment at hand. The last words underlined before he gave the book to poor young Power are these:

Farewell! but not forever, brother dear.

Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow.

This book, having been shown to Cardinal Newman, he writes: "I was deeply moved to find that a book of mine had been in Gordon's hands, and that the description of a soul preparing for death."]

GERONTIUS! many never heard thy name,

Till from Khartoum, and through a mist of blood,

To reverent English hearts the message came,"His spirit by your hero's spirit stood."

Dream of Gerontius! and the busy men

Who have no time for dreaming, tried to see What thread, impalpable to grosser ken, Linked thee to him, a great Reality!

Both fighters! and maybe the sorer strife

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From The Contemporary Review.
WHAT CAN HISTORY TEACH US?

BY W. S. LILLY.

GRIMSTON. Proof-sheets again, I see. 'Chapters in European History." Of making many books there is no end. And I suppose, as long as the public will buy, authors will write. But of all subjects that can occupy the mind of man, this of human history seems to me to be one of the vainest. You remember Goethe's saying: "The history of the world in the eyes of the thinker is nothing but a tissue of absurdities, a mass of madness and wickedness, nothing can be made of it."

LUXMOORE. I yield to no one in admiration of Goethe's greatness. But it had its limits. His judgments are sometimes narrow, as this seems to me to be. His methodic spirit was not at home in history. I recognize the madness and the wickedness in the annals of the world as fully as any one can. But I certainly think that some further facts may be drawn from them. Here comes our friend Temperley. I wonder what he would have to say about it?

TEMPERLEY. About what? You know I am one of Shakespeare's "dumb wise men."

istence? or can they even yield us any practical lessons for the guidance of life?

GRIMSTON. Yes; we meet on the common ground of facts- the débris of the past. But remember, that those facts are confined to a very limited period of the existence of our race, that they are most fragmentary and imperfect, and that no man living, however encyclopædic his knowledge, can be acquainted with more than a few of them. Not very promising materials for a philosophy of history!

LUXMOORE. True, the historic period of humanity goes back but a little way, and, of course, much of the record of human action during that time is lost. But much remains. A vast number of details are enwrapped in hopeless obscurity. They would not add much to our real informa. tion if we knew them. The general facts stand out with sufficient clearness in the life of the race — a vast series, throwing abundant light upon man and his environment and development. Surely this is unquestionable.

GRIMSTON. Three or four thousand years! Make it five thousand, as you certainly may. But what is this but a mere fragment of the ages during which our race has existed and has had a history? However, I will be generous, and will let GRIMSTON. Seul le silence est grand. you throw in the prehistoric period too. But your Grandeur must know that Lux-I am far from undervaluing the marvelmoore has written a book of history, and I am telling him, upon the authority of Goethe, that it is but lost labor.

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lous display of scientific induction by which our knowledge of the past has been extended beyond any historical monuLUXMOORE. The truth is, our too can- ments. Indeed, I confess that this un. I did friend and I are both blessed conscious history seems to me to be of cursed, he would say - with the taste for much more value than what I read in the great questions. And what a great ques-professed historians whose narrative, I tion is that of the moral significance of strongly suspect, is mainly what Napohistory! leon called it, a fable agreed upon." TEMPERLEY. Well, I should like to hear Myths are truer than literature; language very much what you and Grimston have does not lie. Comparative mythology to say about it. I am an excellent lis- reveals to us the condition of our race in tener, as you know; and, having no opin-remote ages, when no historian existed ions in particular of my own on the sub- or could exist; comparative philology ject, I can promise benevolent neutrality discloses to us archaic facts, which are, to both of you. You meet on the common even now, the most important factors in ground that history discloses a vast num- our every-day life: the filiation of races, ber of facts about the past career of hu- nascent religions, aboriginal laws, the fun. manity. The point at issue is, I suppose, damental constitution of human speech, Can we learn anything from those facts when, as our friend Sayce suggests, vocal regarding the great enigma of human ex-signs superseded pictorial as vehicles of

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