epoch without art,--such
a thing as that, he would say France had not known since she was
France. And he would be right.

But if said of England it would be pretty nearly true, if it were said
that the whole amount of art of the decorative kind that existed in
England between 1810 and 1850, for instance, would fill but a small
museum, and that its quality would fill but slight requirements, it
would require a bold Anglophil to contradict. There came a dull pall,
like that of her own black fogs, over social London, and the
stucco-fronted languors of Baker Street and Portland Place are no
worse than were the dull monotony of the interiors behind them.
Veneered and polished mahogany furniture, very much too large and too
heavy for the rooms; black haircloth, like the grave clothes of Art,
for the covering of everything that could be sat upon; cold,
brownish-red curtains, of shiny but not lustrous material; silver
candlesticks of monstrous design,--these, and such as these, were the
decorative objects which our fathers or our grandfathers admired, or
felt that they must admire for want of better, during the unhappy
years that I have cited. The delicate carvings that the furniture of a
generation just previous had received, were forgotten. People put up
with Chippendale chairs in their dining-rooms because they had
belonged to their fathers and nothing special was offered to take
their place; but there is no record that they cared for them. The
richer and more fantastic carvings of Grinling Gibbons had never
obtained any general recognition nor availed to modify the woodwork of
the domestic interiors of England. The brocades and flowered silks
which the eighteenth century had revelled in, and if in England not
strong enough artistically to produce them itself, had brought into
England from other lands;--these were replaced by the dismal things I
have alluded to, and no vestige of them seems to have remained in the
parlors of that unhappy time.

Richness of costume had disappeared with the wars of the French
Revolution. Embroidered silk coats had given place gradually to
claret-colored and blue broadcloth, and this gave place to black, and
all variety in costume had disappeared completely; and now, from 1810
to 1850, fantastically varied and interesting house-furnishing and
decoration had followed, as I suppose it inevitably must follow;
costume, being, one fears, a necessary part of anything like a
prosperous artistic ep