so much now. The process of lacquering is as tedious
to-day as it ever was, and the reproductions sell for goodly sums. A
tall secretary of black and gold lacquer may cost six hundred dollars.
You can imagine what an Eighteenth Century piece would cost!

The person who said that a taste for old furniture and bibelots was
"worse than a passion, it was a vice," was certainly near the truth! It
is an absorbing pursuit, an obsession, and it grows with what it feeds
on. As in objects of art, so in old furniture, the supply will always
equal the demand of the unwary. The serious amateur will fight shy of
all miracles and content himself with excellent reproductions. Nothing
later than the furniture of the Eighteenth Century is included in the
term, "old furniture." There are many fine cabinet makers in the early
Nineteenth Century, but from them until the last decade the horrors that
were perpetrated have never been equaled in the history of household
decorations.

I fancy the furniture of the mid-Victorian era will never be coveted by
collectors, unless someone should build a museum for the freakish
objects of house furnishing. America could contribute much to such a
collection, for surely the black walnut era of the Nineteenth Century
will never be surpassed in ugliness and bad taste, unless--rare
fortune--there should be a sudden epidemic of appreciation among
cabinet-makers, which would result in their taking the beautiful wood in
the black walnut beds and wardrobes and such and make it over into
worth-while things. It would be a fine thing to release the mistreated,
velvety wood from its grotesqueries, and give it a renaissance in
graceful cabinets, small tables, footstools, and the many small things
that could be so easily made from huge unwieldy wardrobes and beds and
bureaux.

The workmen of to-day have their eyes opened. They have no excuse for
producing unworthy things, when the greatest private collections are
loaned or given outright to the museums. The new wing of the
Metropolitan Museum in New York houses several fine old collections of
furniture, the Hoentschel collection, for which the wing was really
planned, having been given to the people of New York by Mr. Pierpont
Morgan. This collection is an education in the French decorative arts.
Then, too, there is the Bolles collection of American furniture
presented to the museum by Mrs. Russell Sage.

I have no quarrel with the honest dealers who are making f