sm of the furniture, bespeaks the life of
quiet souls whose days are as devoid of luxury as their dwellings.
You read in the cold grey tints the formal stiffness and unrelieved
regularity around the Quaker-like flatness of their existence. In
others, there is an air of ill-done display, a straining after effect,
which shows itself in costly but ill-assorted details, a mingling of all
styles and eras without repose or keeping. The bad pretentious pictures,
the faulty bronzes, meagre casts of poor originals, the gaudy china,
are safe warranty for the vulgarity of their owners; while the humble
parlour of a village inn can be, as I have seen it, made to evidence
the cultivated tastes and polished habits of those who have made it
the halting-place of a day. We might go back and trace how much of our
knowledge of the earliest ages is derived from the study of the interior
of their dwellings; what a rich volume of information is conveyed in a
mosaic; what a treatise does not lie in a frescoed wall!

The room in which I now found myself was a long, and for its length a
narrow, apartment; a range of tall windows, deeply sunk in the thick
wall, occupied one side, opposite to which was a plain wall covered with
pictures from floor to cornice, save where, at a considerable distance
from one another, were two splendidly carved chimney-pieces of black
oak, one representing 'The Adoration of the Shepherds,' and the other
'The Miraculous Draught of Fishes'--the latter done with a relief, a
vigour, and a movement I have never seen equalled. Above these were
some armorial trophies of an early date, in which, among the maces and
battle-axes, I could recognise some weapons of Eastern origin, which by
the family, I learned, were ascribed to the periods of the Crusades.

Between the windows were placed a succession of carved oak cabinets of
the seventeenth century--beautiful specimens of art, and for all their
quaintness far handsomer objects of furniture than our modern luxury has
introduced among us. Japan vases of dark blue-and-green were filled with
rare flowers; here and there small tables of costly buhl invited you
to the window recesses, where the downy ottomans, pillowed with Flemish
luxury, suggested rest if not sleep. The pictures, over which I could
but throw a passing glance, were all by Flemish painters, and of that
character which so essentially displays their chief merits of richness
of colour and tone--Gerard Dow and Ostade,