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fine thing. Now the slightest thought will be sufficient to convince
any one who has an eye at all, of the ill effect of numerous
looking-glasses, and especially of large ones. Regarded apart from
its reflection, the mirror presents a continuous, flat, colourless,
unrelieved surface,--a thing always and obviously unpleasant. Considered
as a reflector, it is potent in producing a monstrous and odious
uniformity: and the evil is here aggravated, not in merely direct
proportion with the augmentation of its sources, but in a ratio
constantly increasing. In fact, a room with four or five mirrors
arranged at random, is, for all purposes of artistic show, a room of
no shape at all. If we add to this evil, the attendant glitter upon
glitter, we have a perfect farrago of discordant and displeasing
effects. The veriest bumpkin, on entering an apartment so bedizzened,
would be instantly aware of something wrong, although he might be
altogether unable to assign a cause for his dissatisfaction. But let
the same person be led into a room tastefully furnished, and he would be
startled into an exclamation of pleasure and surprise.
It is an evil growing out of our republican institutions, that here a
man of large purse has usually a very little soul which he keeps in
it. The corruption of taste is a portion or a pendant of the
dollar-manufacture. As we grow rich, our ideas grow rusty. It is,
therefore, not among our aristocracy that we must look (if at all, in
Appallachia), for the spirituality of a British boudoir. But we have
seen apartments in the tenure of Americans of moderns [possibly "modest"
or "moderate"] means, which, in negative merit at least, might vie with
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