ABSTRACT
To quote a common-sense and practical article from Blackwood’s Magazine on ‘The Arts in the Household’, by Mr. Beavington Atkinson, a gentleman who has done much to foster and promote the more general use of artistic culture in everyday life. Certainly, if people would but furnish their dwellings as well as their understandings according to the dictates of this “common sense,” much of the nonsense, extravagance, and bad taste which have found place within the English household, would be turned out of doors. Happily the well-regulated Court of the last twenty years has wrought a change for the better not only in social habits, but in matters pertaining to taste. So true is it that the health or disease of the commonwealth becomes felt not only in great national monuments, but in the minor works which embellish even the humblest dwelling.
