powdered wig and a powdered mistress, of magnificent
fountains and courtiers and ladies dancing the gavotte, of a brilliant
court and striking epoch. Not at all. We think, both of us, of a gilt
chair with a brocaded seat (slightly worn), and maybe a sofa to match.
If you say that you don't, I must politely but firmly--well, differ
with you.

Alas! poor Louis XIV was not the only worthy (or unworthy) of the past
who has come down to the present, not as a personality but as a piece
of furniture, a dog, a boot, or some other equally ignominious thing.
Speaking of furniture, there's the Morris chair. The man who made the
Morris chair was a great and good man--not because he made the Morris
chair, but in spite of it! He composed haunting poems, he wrote lovely
prose romances of the far-off days of knights and ladyes and magic
spells, such as that hight _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_, a right
brave book mayhap you have not perused, to your exceeding great loss,
for beautiful it is and fair to read and full of the mighty desire of
a man for a maid. Beside all this, he printed lovely books by other
writers, and designed wall-paper, and painted pictures, and thundered
against the deadening effect on men of mechanical toil, and in social
theories was far in advance of his age. Such a man was William
Morris--known to-day to the mass of mankind for one of the most
accursed articles of furniture ever devised by human ingenuity gone
astray! Every day, in a million homes, men and women sit in Morris
chairs (made by machinery) and read Robert W. Chambers and Florence
Barclay. Such, alas, is fame!

Then there was Queen Anne--in many respects an estimable woman, though
leaving much to be desired as a monarch. She had her Rooseveltian
virtues, being the mother of seventeen children (none of whom lived to
grow beyond infancy, to be sure); and she had what the world just now
has come to regard as the monarchical vice of autocracy. In her reign
science and literature flourished, though without much aid from her,
and the English court buzzed with intrigue and politics. But speak the
name _Queen Anne_ aloud, and then tell me the picture you get. Is it a
picture of the lady or her period? Is it a picture of Pope and Dryden
sitting in a London coffee-house? No, it is not--that is, unless you
are a very learned, or a very young, person. It is a picture of a
horrible architectural monstrosity built about thirty or forty years
ago in any Ameri