on, for an ecclesiastical
purpose. This was of the beginning of the last century.[106]

While we appreciate and should take advantage of our national tendency
to naturalistic design, we must beware of looking on fixed rules as
bonds which cramp our liberty, and of thinking that nature should be
our only guide to an otherwise unassisted and unfettered inspiration.
Without the wholesome checks of experience and educated taste, and the
knowledge which teaches us what to avoid, as well as what to imitate,
founded on the successes and failures of others, we fall into weak
imitations of natural objects.

Mr. Redgrave points out how unpleasant and jarring to our sense of
what is appropriate, and therefore how offensive to good taste and
common sense, it is to tread on a carpet of water-lilies swimming in
blue pools, or on fruits and flowers heaped up and casting shadows
probably towards the light.[107] Woollen lions and tigers, as large as
life, basking before the fire in a wreath of roses, are alarming
rather than agreeable, and are of the nature of a practical joke in
art. It is the search for novelty in naturalism that leads to such
astonishing compositions; and these, being successively rejected in
the heart of our civilization and culture, are drifted away to
vulgarize our colonies, or to be sold cheap to furnish Continental
hotels, and make the English traveller blush for his home
manufactures.

SYMBOLICAL AND CONVENTIONAL.

Though it is true that the highest art, pictorial and sculptural, is
always struggling towards naturalism, the art of decoration is, by its
nature, constantly tending to conventionalism. Patterns, if not
absolutely geometrical or naturalistic, must be classed under this
principle. Let us examine what is meant by a conventional pattern.

It may be said that the conventional includes every form--the
symbolic, the naturalistic, or even the hieroglyphic--that is selected
and consecrated to convey a certain idea. The lily of Florence, which
is something between a lily and an iris, but unlike either, is a
conventional form; likewise the lily of France, which it is said was
once a conventional frog. The rose of England, the shamrock, and the
thistle have always been more naturalistic than is usual in such
heraldic designs; but the parti-coloured rose of York and Lancaster
was decidedly conventional, and heraldic.

Conventional patterns now are those which, having been originally
naturalistic in st