linen or wool spinning-wheel
are in place and appropriate pieces of furnishing for a studio; the one
for colour, and the other for form, and because also they may serve as
models; but they are sadly out of place in a modern city house, or even
in the parlour of a country cottage.

We all recognise the fact that a room carefully furnished in one style
makes a oneness of impression; whereas if things are brought together
heterogeneously, even if each separate thing is selected for its own
special virtue and beauty, the feeling of enjoyment will be far less
complete.

There is a certain kinship in pieces of furniture made or originated at
the same period and fashioned by a prevailing sentiment of beauty, which
makes them harmonious when brought together; and if our minds are in
sympathy with that period and style of expression, it becomes a great
pleasure to use it as a means of expression for ourselves. Whatever
appeals to us as the best or most beautiful thought in manufacture we
have a right to adopt, but we should study to understand the
circumstances of its production, in order to do justice to it and
ourselves, since style is evolved from surrounding influences. It would
seem also that its periods and origin should not be too far removed from
the interests and ways of our own time, and incongruous with it, because
it would be impossible to carry an utterly foreign period or method of
thought into all the intimacies of domestic life. The fad of furnishing
different rooms in different periods of art, and in the fashion of
nations and peoples whose lives are totally dissimilar, may easily be
carried too far, and the spirit of home, and even of beauty, be lost. Of
course this applies to small, and not to grand houses, which are always
exceptions to the purely domestic idea.

There are many reasons why one should be in sympathy with what is called
the "colonial craze"; not only because colonial days are a part of our
history, but because colonial furniture and decorations were derived
directly from the best period of English art. Its original designers
were masters who made standards in architectural and pictorial as well
as household art. The Adams brothers, to whom many of the best forms of
the period are referable, were great architects as well as great
designers. Even so distinguished a painter as Hogarth delighted in
composing symmetrical forms for furniture, and preached persistently the
beauty of curved instead