ABSTRACT
As Cynthia Wall has so magisterially illustrated in The Prose of Things (2006), descriptions of rooms hold a marginal position in eighteenth-century texts. This is due partially to conventions of writing and partially to the absence of fixed furniture arrangements before the end of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, literary descriptions before the eighteenth century were often stylistic exercises in rhetorical enumeration. Mieke Bal, in her superb essay on description, cites (a translation of) a locus amoenus passage from Longus’s novel Daphnis and Chloë:
And that garden indeed was a most beautiful and goodly thing and such as might become a prince. For it lay extended in length a whole furlong. It was situated on a high ground, and had to its breadth four acres. To a spacious field one would easily have likened it. Trees it had of all kinds, the apple, the pear, the myrtle, the pomegranate, the fig, and the olive; and to these on the one side there grew a rare and taller sort of vines, that bended over and reclined their ripening bunches of grapes among the apples and pomegranates, as if they would vie and contend for beauty and worth of fruits with them. So many kinds there were of satives, or of such as are planted, grafted, or set. To these were not wanting the cypress, the laurel, the platan, and the pine. And towards them, instead of the vine, the ivy leaned, and with the errantry of her boughs and her scattered blackberries did imitate the vines and shadowed beauty of the ripening grapes.
Within were kept, as in a garrison, trees of lower growth that bore fruit. Without stood the barren trees, enfolding all, much like a fort or some strong wall that had been built by the hand of art; and these were encompassed with a spruce, thin hedge. By alleys and glades there was everywhere a just distermination [sic! M.F.] of things from things, an orderly discretion of tree from tree; but on the tops the boughs met to interweave their limbs and leaves with one another’s, and a man would have thought that all this had not been, as indeed it was, the wild of nature, but rather the work of curious art. Nor were there wanting to these, borders and banks of various flowers, some the earth’s own volunteers, some the structure of the artist’s hand. The roses, hyacinths, and lilies were set and planted by the hand; the violet, the daffodil, and anagall [sic!] the earth gave up of her own good will. In the summer there was shade, in the spring the beauty and fragrancy of flowers, in the autumn the pleasantness of the fruits; and at every season amusement and delight (Longus, 1955, pp. 189-91; cited Bal, 1982, pp. 112-13).
