ark which will admit of very general
application, that the arts which may be made subservient to embellishment
and magnificence, have always far outstripped those which only conduce to
comfort and convenience. The savage paints his body with gorgeous colors,
who wants a blanket to protect him from the cold; and nations have heaped
up pyramids to enhance their sense of importance, who have dwelt
contentedly in dens and caves of the earth. Something of the same
incongruity may be remarked at Penshurst, and other English mansions of
the same age and order; where we sometimes ascend to galleries of
inestimable paintings over steps roughly hewn with the axe, and look upon
ceilings of the most exquisite and elaborate carving suspended over floors
which have never had the benefit of the joiner's plane.

In the tastes, too, and personal habits of that elder period, contrasts of
a not less striking nature might be easily pointed out. We may doubt, for
instance, whether beauty will ever array itself in apparel of more cost
and profusion than that in which the high-born dames of Wresill and
Penshurst swept through their stately apartments. Grandeur will never make
its presence felt by a greater weight of ceremony, nor ever extend a more
watchful and provident care to all the equipage of rank and ostentation.
Flattery, we may safely assert, will never offer its incense in a more
seductive form, than when it borrowed the pencil of Holbein and the lyre
of Spenser. Yet these persons were the same who trode upon floors strewn
with rushes, and deemed it a point of nicety and refinement if these were
changed sufficiently often to prevent the soiling of their clothes. They
are the same who dined without forks, and thought pewter dishes too great
a luxury to be used in common by the highest nobility; who transported
their ladies on pillions for want of coaches, and themselves struggled
through mire for want of pavements; who, with a knowledge of the
manufacture of glass, and possessed beyond ourselves of an exquisite skill
in coloring it, were yet too frugal or careless to use it freely in
lighting their houses. It was an age when the sick were plied with such
delicate restoratives as 'mummy and the flesh of hedge-hogs,' and tables
loaded with such dainties as cranes, lapwings, sea-gulls, bitterns and
curlews. Such is the unequal progress which is often maintained in habits
of undistinguishing luxury and habits of genuine refinement; so grea