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PHILOSOPHY OF FURNITURE.
In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of
their residences, the English are supreme. The Italians have but little
sentiment beyond marbles and colours. In France, meliora probant,
deteriora sequuntur--the people are too much a race of gadabouts to
maintain those household proprieties of which, indeed, they have a
delicate appreciation, or at least the elements of a proper sense. The
Chinese and most of the eastern races have a warm but inappropriate
fancy. The Scotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an
indeterminate idea that a curtain is not a cabbage. In Spain they are
all curtains--a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. The
Hottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone
are preposterous.
How this happens, it is not difficult to see. We have no aristocracy of
blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable
thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display
of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the
heraldic display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily
understood, and which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been
brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself.
To speak less abstractly. In England, for example, no mere parade
of costly appurtenances would be so likely as with us, to create
an impression of the beautiful in respect to the appurtenances
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