s on the article a stamp of individuality--instead of
the furniture being, as it was in the seventeenth century in England, and
some hundred years earlier in Italy and in France, the craftsman's
pride--it is now the result of the rapid multiplication of some pattern
which has caught the popular fancy, generally a design in which there is a
good deal of decorative effect for a comparatively small price.

The difficulty of altering this unsatisfactory state of things is evident.
On the one side, the manufacturers or the large furnishing firms have a
strong case in their contention that the public will go to the market it
considers the best: and when decoration is pitted against simplicity,
though the construction which accompanies the former be ever so faulty,
the more pretentious article will be selected. When a successful pattern
has been produced, and arrangements and sub-contracts have been made for
its repetition in large quantities, any considerable variation made in the
details (even if it be the suppression of ornament) will cause an addition
to the cost which those only who understand something of a manufacturer's
business can appreciate.

During the present generation an Art movement has sprung up called
AEstheticism, which has been defined as the "Science of the Beautiful and
the Philosophy of the Fine Arts," and aims at carrying a love of the
beautiful into all the relations of life. The fantastical developments
which accompanied the movement brought its devotees into much ridicule
about ten years ago, and the pages of _Punch_ of that time will be found
to happily travesty its more amusing and extravagant aspects. The great
success of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, "Patience," produced in 1881,
was also to some extent due to the humorous allusions to the
extravagances of the "Aesthetetes." In support of what may be termed a
higher AEstheticism, Mr. Ruskin has written much to give expression to his
ideas and principles for rendering our surroundings more beautiful. Sir
Frederic Leighton and Mr. Alma Tadema are conspicuous amongst those who
have in their houses carried such principles into effect, and amongst
other artists who have been and are, more or less, associated with this
movement, may be named Rossetti, Burne Jones, and Holman Hunt. As a writer
on AEstheticism has observed:--"When the extravagances attending the
movement have been purged away, there may be still left an educating
influence, which will