short-sighted, is, I concede, an absolute necessity; and a piano-forte,
like a coffin, should occupy the centre even of the smallest given
drawing-room--"the court awards it, and the law doth give it,"--but why
multiply footstools, till there is no taking a single step in safety? An
Indian cabinet also, or a buhl armoire, are, either, or both of them,
very fit and becoming; but it cannot be right to make a broker's shop of
your best apartment. An ink-stand, as large as a show twelfth-cake, is
just and lawful; ditto, an ornamental escrutoire; and a _nécessaire_ for
the work-table is, if there be meaning in language, perfectly necessary.
These, with an adequate contingent of musical snuff-boxes, _or molu_
clocks, China figures, alabaster vases and flower-pots, together with a
discreet superfluity of cut-paper nondescripts, albums, screens, toys,
prints, caricatures, duodecimo classics, new novels and souvenirs, to
cut a dash, and litter the tables, must be allowed to the taste and
refinement of the times. But surely some space should be left for
depositing a coffee-cup, or laying down a useful volume, when the hand
may require to be relieved from its weight, or when it is proper to take
a pinch of snuff, or agreeable to wipe one's forehead. Josses, beakers,
and Sevres' vases have unquestionably the _entrée_ into a genteel
apartment; but they are not entitled to a monopoly of the _locale_; nor
are Roman antiquities, or statues even by Canova, justifiable in
usurping the elbow-room of living men and women. Most unfortunately for
myself, I have a very small house, and a wife of the most enlarged
taste; and the disproportion between these blessings is so great, that I
cannot move without the risk of a heavy pecuniary loss by breakage, and
a heavier personal affliction in perpetual imputations of awkwardness.
Then, again, it is no easy matter to put on a smiling and indifferent
countenance, whenever a friend, accustomed to some latitude of motion,
runs, as is often the case, his devastating chair against a high-priced
work of art, or overturns a table laden with an "infinite thing" in