ABSTRACT
Charles Hamilton Aide was a colourful French-born bachelor of versatile accomplishments in a range of arts. He wrote numerous novels, several volumes of poetry, composed songs and exhibited his art works at various galleries. Our textile fabrics, our house decorations, our herbaceous gardens – soaring into poetry from the dry prose of ribbon borders and “bedding-out” plants – the combinations of tint in dress which the authors see daily in the streets, all point to the same improvement. The grating discords which jarred upon us in the terrible Magenta period, and which still shock our aesthetic sense so commonly in Germany and Italy, seldom offend us now in England. The room or the garden is in fact a canvas, whereon they paint our picture with furniture or flowers instead of a palette and brushes.
