ABSTRACT
The whole style of our modern furniture, as well as our modern dress, is largely due to the terrible white walls. Hence the staring suites of furniture which seem positively to scream at one in their obtrusiveness, with the result of obliterating the company, who vainly struggle to be conspicuous by gaudier phantasies in dress. Costly and graceful dresses seem to us strangely out of place, even for high days and festivals, in such abodes. The colours long contemned as ‘old-fashioned’—the colours in vogue before the century—have been generally more beautiful and more becoming than any we have. Hence colours faded by age are often more beautiful than in their pristine freshness. The old Indian and Persian manufactures, which will never grow old, look for ever perfect and grand, and this is not only due to the wondrous Oriental feeling for combining colours—it is partly due to the imperfection of the colours they used.
