prisms and brilliants, a pair or so of glass and porcelain vases, an ormolu clock, and a few water-colors or family portraits in heavy gilt frames, with knobs and curls to bring out the gilding into full prominence. We can hardly wonder at them when we look at what greater authorities have done at the jumbled mass of internal decoration in Exeter Cathedral, or at the glassy-looking, slippery, oily, over-polished, and glistening interior of the Albert Chapel at Windsor.

Now the error of all this consists in its neglect of the principle of relief. In order to produce an æsthetic effect you must have, not only a few pretty things, but also, if I may be allowed the expression, a great many ugly or neutral things. You must not make your bouquet consist entirely of tuberose and gladiolus; you must intersperse a little green foliage as well. You must not paint your picture all crimson and purple; you must have a bit of brown hillside and cloudy sky. The great secret of internal decoration consists in making the background into a background, and allowing your pretty things to come out against it by contrast. That is why everybody, or almost everybody, prefers (when once they have seen it) a neutral or retiring wall-paper to a white and gold pattern interspersed with casual bunches of red and green. You don't want your paper to be pretty in the sense of stimulating; you want it to be restful, delicate, relieving. If you can make it rich in diapered fretwork as well, so much the better; but its first object must be to retire, not to obtrude itself on the eye. Then, having secured such a general background, your next object must be to choose such decorations as will show well against it. In short, while your relief should be relieving, your decorations should be decorative. It is not enough that they should be pretty separately, or when closely examined; they should be pretty then and there, as they stand, in conjunction with all their surroundings. It is the neglect of this condition which makes most of our rooms into a bedlam of conflicting objects; it is attention to it which alone can make them into harmonious and intelligible wholes.

As a rule, a great deal too much labor

is expended upon would-be ornamental products, and with very little artistic effect. Take, as a supreme and awful example, the old-fashioned Berlin woolwork. Look at all the time wasted in depicting and grounding those impossible bunches of patchwork roses, those ladies with square red blocks of woollen mosaic to represent their cheeks, those lap-dogs with lustreless eyes and rectangularly waving tails. Yet, incredible as it seems, human beings used to buy pieces of this work with the pattern already finished, and spend days in mechanically filling-in the black background. They paid work-girls for doing the only interesting part of the design, such as it was, to save themselves even the faint intellectual effort of counting the holes, and then contentedly reduced their individuality to the level of a steam power-loom to cover the remainder of the canvas with uniform lines of black

stitches. Happily, crewel-work has now saved one half the British race from this depth of artistic degradation, and though they still buy their patterns ready traced, instead of honestly designing them for themselves, they do manage now to turn out something pretty in the end, and to make the result not wholly and ridiculously inadequate to the time spent over it. I have lately seen a beautiful brown holland dado, one of the most effective bits of decoration that I ever saw for people of moderate means. It consisted of a plain white strip of the simple material, unworked below, with a border about eighteen inches wide on top, worked in crewels with original designs of birds and water-plants, drawn in Japanese fashion, without reference to the artificial limits of the material. This piece of work was very rapidly wrought in outline merely, by a few deft-fingered girls, and yet it was fifty times more effective than a dozen antimacassars or table covers of the ordinary South Kensington type, which would have taken three times as long to make, and would not have had any of the spontaneity or originality of this pretty and clever dado.

Half our decorative work fails in just this same particular, that it lavishes labor without thinking of general effect. Vases are adorned with all kinds of quasi ornamental knobs and excrescences,

which take a great deal of time to make, and yet only succeed in spoiling the outline of what might otherwise have been a pretty form. Pictures are la boriously painted on porcelain or glass which would really look far better in uniform tints, or with simple parti-colored glazes. Legs of chairs and tables are turned into alternate bulbs and contractions when they would look much more solid and workmanlike with undecorated tapering or fluted stems. Chairs and sofas are contorted and agonized into the strangest wriggles, like dying serpents, all for the express purpose, apparently, of preventing their shape from being readily recognized by the eye in any position whatsoever. Mirrors are surmounted by curls and arabesques in gilt plaster of Paris, which generally mar the good effect of a simple square or canted rectangular frame. And all these curious uglifications to borrow an expressive word from "Alice in Wonderland"-have been positively intended to beautify the objects upon which they are imposed. I have stood in a pottery or glass factory and actually seen a workman take a natural and pretty vase in its plastic condition and spoil it before my very eyes by crimping the lip, gauffering the neck, and adding a pair of bastard rococo handles to the two sides.

It will be said, no doubt, that most people like these things; that the taste for simple decorative objects, for relief, and for quiet arrangement, is confined to a very small number of people. I can hardly think so ill myself of the average taste. No doubt there are some people whose naturally strong and hearty nerves will enable them to stand so much stimulation as one gets in the ordinary blue and gold drawing-room, without fatigue. There is no more need to surround these strong-minded persons with decorations which they would never admire than there is need to compel all curry-loving and devilledmeat-eating Indian colonels to forswear sherry and Madeira, abandon kedgeree and red peppers, and take to drinking

light hocks, eating vol-au-vents or smooth jellies, and smoking Turkish cigarettes after dinner, instead of their accustomed Havanas. But the vast majority of English people are really and unaffectedly charmed when they see a room prettily furnished, with due regard both to stimulation and relief. They allow at once that the effect is pleasant, and they are anxious to imitate it so far as they can. In most cases, the fact that their houses have been already furnished and decorated for them on the gilt mirror and blue satin principle, prevents them from adopting offhand the fashion they admire; but one often hears them say, "If ever I set up house afresh I shall get all my things in this new style. Then, again, there are others who like the old-fashioned glitter for association's sake, and find quiet papers and carpets "gloomy;" but these people often come round after a while and learn to admire what at first they disliked. Only the other day an old lady was looking with me into the windows of a good upholsterer's and praising the pretty textile fabrics and the beautiful pottery displayed in tasteful black cabinets. "It takes some time," she said, "to acquire a taste for things of this sort; but when one has acquired it they are so much more satisfying than the gilt absurdities we used to put into our rooms a few years ago." This is the feeling of thousands and thousands. They feel repelled at first by what they think the dulness and dinginess of restful backgrounds for decoration; but when they have learned how to arrange them, and how to bring in those bits of color and ornament for which the background is only a relief, they find the whole result a hundred times more satisfying than the old chaos of glitter and jingle. The astounding revolution in taste within the last ten years sufficiently shows that the world at large is delighted to be taught decorative principles when any one who understands them is willing to undertake the task.— Cornhill Magazine.

IV.

I FEAR the editor of the Nineteenth Century will get little thanks from his readers for allowing so much space in closely successive numbers to my talk of old-fashioned men and things. I have, nevertheless, asked his indulgence, this time, for a note or two concerning yet older fashions, in order to bring into sharper clearness the leading outlines of literary fact which I ventured only in my last paper to secure in silhouette, obscurely asserting itself against the limelight of recent moral creed, and fiction manufacture.

The Bishop of Manchester, on the occasion of the great Wordsworthian movement in that city for the enlargement, adornment, and sale of Thirlmere, observed, in his advocacy of these operations, that very few people, he supposed, had ever seen Thirlmere. His Lordship might have supposed, with greater felicity, that very few people had ever read Wordsworth. My own experience in that matter is that the amiable persons who call themselves "Wordsworthian" have read-usually a long time ago—“ Lucy Gray," "The April Mornings," a picked sonnet or two, and the Ode on the Intimations, which last they seem generally to be under the impression that nobody else has ever met with; and my further experience of these sentimental students is that they are seldom inclined to put in practice a single syllable of the advice tendered them by their model poet.

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Now, as I happen myself to have used Wordsworth as a daily text-book from youth to age, and have lived, moreover, in all essential points according to the tenor of his teaching, it was matter of some mortification to me when, at Oxford, I tried to get the memory of Mr. Wilkinson's spade honored by some practical spadework at Ferry Hincksey, to find that no other tutor in Oxford could see the slightest good or meaning in what I was about; and that although my friend Professor Rolleston Occasionally sought the shades of our Rydalian laurels with expressions cf

admiration, his professional manner of "from pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine" was to fill the Oxford Museum with the scabbed skulls of plague-struck cretins.

I therefore respectfully venture to intimate to my bucolic friends that I know, more vitally by far than they, what is in Wordsworth, and what is not. Any man who chooses to live by his precepts will thankfully find in them a beauty and rightness (exquisite rightness I called it, in "Sesame and Lilies") which will preserve him alike from mean pleasure, vain hope, and guilty deed: so that he will neither mourn at the gate of the fields which with covetous spirit he sold, nor drink of the waters which with yet more covetous spirit he stole, nor devour the bread of the poor in secret, nor set on his guest-table the poor man's lamb-in all these homely virtues and assured justices let him be Wordsworth's true disciple; and he will then be able with equanimity to hear it said, when there is need to say so, that his excellent master often wrote verses that were not musical, and sometimes expressed opinions that were not profound.

And the need to say so becomes imperative when the unfinished verse, and uncorrected fancy, are advanced by the affection of his disciples into places of authority where they give countenance to the popular national prejudices from the infection of which, in most cases, they themselves sprang.

Take, for example, the following three and a half lines of the 38th Eccle

But a graver fault of these three and a half lines is that the amazement, the turning, the burning, and the banning, are all alike fictitious; and foul-fictitious, calumniously conceived no less than falsely. Not one of the spectators of the scene referred to was in reality amazed-not one contemptuous, not one maledictory. It is only our gentle minstrel of the meres who sits in the seat of the scornful-only the hermit of Rydal Mount who invokes the malison of Nature.

What the scene verily was, and how witnessed, it will not take long to tell; nor will the tale be useless: but I must first refer the reader to a period preceding, by nearly a century, the great symbolic action under the porch of St. Mark's.

The Protestant ecclesiastic, and infidel historian, who delight to prop their pride, or edge their malice, in unveiling the corruption through which Christianity has passed, should study in every fragment of authentic record which the fury of their age has left, the lives of the three queens of the Priesthood, Theodora, Marozia and Matilda, and the foundation of the merciless power of the popes by the monk Hildebrand. And if there be any of us who would satisfy with nobler food than the catastrophes of the stage, the awe at what is marvellous in human sorrow which makes sacred the fountain of tears in authentic tragedy, let them follow, pace by pace, and pang by pang, the humiliation of the fourth Henry at Canossa, and his death in the church he had built to the Virgin at Spire.

His antagonist, Hildebrand, died twenty years before him; captive to the Normans in Salerno, having seen the Rome in which he had proclaimed his princedom over all the earth, laid in her last ruin; and forever. Rome herself, since her desolation by Guiscard, has been only a grave and a wilderness * -what we call Rome is a mere colony of the stranger in her "Field of Mars. This destruction of Rome by the Normans is accurately and utterly the end of her Capitoline and wolf-suckled power; and from that day her Leonine or

Christian power takes its throne in the Leonine city, sanctified in tradition by its prayer of safety for the Saxon Borgo, in which the childhood of our own Alfred had been trained.

And from this date forward (recollected broadly as 1090, the year of the birth of St. Bernard), no longer oppressed by the remnants of Roman deathChristian faith, chivalry, and art possess the world, and recreate it, through the space of four hundred years-the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.

And, necessarily, in the first of these centuries comes the main debate between the powers of Monk and Knight which was reconciled in this scene under the porch of St. Mark's.

That debate was brought to its crisis and issue by the birth of the new third elemental force of the State-the Citizen.

or for

Sismondi's republican enthusiasm dues not permit him to recognize the essential character of this power. He speaks always of the Republics and the liberties of Italy as if a craftsman differed from a knight only in political privileges, and as if his special virtue. consisted in rendering obedience to no master. But the strength of the great cities of Italy was no more republican than that of her monasteries tresses. The Craftsman of Milan, Sailor of Pisa, and Merchant of Venice are all of them essentially different persons from the soldier and the anchorite; but the city, under the banner of its caroccio, and the command of its podesta, was disciplined far more strictly than any wandering military squadron by its leader, or any lower order of monks under their abbot. In the founding of civic constitutions the Lord of the city is usually its Bishop; and it is curious to hear the republican historian-who, however in judgment blind, is never in heart uncandid-prepare to close his record of the ten years' war of Como with Milan, with this summary of distress to the heroic mountaineers—that "they had lost their Bishop Guido, who was their soul."

I perceive for quite one of the most hopeless of the many difficulties which Modernism finds, and will find, insuperable either by steam or dynamite, that of either wedging or welding into its own

cast-iron head any conception of a king, monk, or townsman of the twelfth and two succeeding centuries. And yet no syllable of the utterance, no fragment of the arts of the middle ages, far less any motive of their deeds, can be read even in the letter-how much less judged in spirit-unless, first of all, we can somewhat imagine all these three living souls.

First, a king who was the best knight in his kingdom, and on whose own swordstrokes hung the fate of Christendom. A king such as Henry the Fowler, the first and third Edwards of England, the Bruce of Scotland, and this Frederic the First of Germany.

Secondly, a monk who had been trained from youth in greater hardship than any soldier, and had learned at last to desire no other life than one of hardship-a man believing in his own and his fellows' immortality, in the aiding powers of angels, and the eternal presence of God; versed in all the science, graceful in all the literature, cognizant of all the policy of his age, and fearless of any created thing, on the earth or under it.

And, lastly, a craftsman absolutely master of his craft, and taking such pride in the exercise of it as all healthy souls take in putting forth their personal powers; proud also of his city and his people; enriching, year by year, their streets with loftier buildings, their treasuries with rare possession; and bequeathing his hereditary art to a line of successive masters, by whose tact of race, and honor of effort, the essential skills of metal-work in gold and steel, of pottery, glass-painting, woodwork, and weaving, were carried to a perfectness never to be surpassed; and of which our utmost modern hope is to produce a not instantly detected imitation.

These three kinds of persons, I repeat, we have to conceive before we can understand any single event of the Middle Ages. For all that is enduring in them was done by men such as these. History, indeed, records twenty undoings for one deed, twenty desolations for one redemption; and thinks the fool and villain potent as the wise and true. But Nature and her laws recognize only the noble ; generations of the cruel pass, like the darkness of locust plagues, while

one loving and brave heart establishes a nation.

I give the character of Barbarossa in the woods of Sismondi, a man sparing in the praise of emperors:

"The death of Frederic was mourned even by the cities which so long had been the objects of his hostility and the victims of his vengeance. All the Lombards-even the Milanese--acknowledged his rare courage, his constancy in misfortune-his generosity in conquest.

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An intimate conviction of the justice of his cause had often rendered him cruel, even to ferocity, against those who still resisted; but after victory he took vengeance only on senseless walls; and, irritated as he had been by the people of Milan, Crema, and Tortona, and whatever blood he had shed during battle, he never sullied his triumph by odious punishments. In spite of the treason which he on one occasion used against Alessandria, his promises were in general respected; and when, after the peace of Constance, the towns which had been most inveterately hostile to him received him within their walls, they had no need to guard against any attempt on his part to suppress the privileges he had once recognized.'

My own estimate of Frederic's character would be scarcely so favorable; it is the only point of history on which I have doubted the authority even of my own master, Carlyle. But I am concerned here only with the actualities of his wars in Italy, with the people of her cities, and the head of her religion.

Frederic of Suabia, direct heir of the Ghibelline rights, while nearly related by blood to the Guelph houses of Bavaria and Saxony, was elected emperor almost in the exact middle of the twelfth century (1152). He was called into Italy by the voices of Italians. The then Pope, Eugenius III., invoked his aid against the Roman people under Arnold of Brescia. The people of Lodi prayed his protection against the tyrannies of Milan.

Frederic entered the plain of Verona in 1154, by the valley of the Adigeravaged the territory of Milan-pillaged and burned Tortona, Asti, and Chieri

kept his his Christinas at Novara ; marched on Rome-delivered up Ar