lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration have
sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a
cumulative force and achieves a conspicuous commonness. Stem and petal
and leaf--the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by
rote--are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness and
insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces. The most ugly of all
imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-house arrayed
for those whom Americans call summer-boarders, is beset with flowers. It
blooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron garden. The floor flourishes
with blossoms adust, poorly conventionalised into a kind of order; the
table-cover is ablaze with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper
is set with bunches; the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses and
lilies in its very construction, over the muslin blinds an impotent sprig
is scattered. In the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the plaster
picture-frames, in the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in the pediment
of the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the barometer, in the
finials of sofa and arm-chair, in the finger-plates of the 'grained'
door, is to be seen the ineffectual portrait or to be traced the stale
inspiration of the flower. And what is this bossiness around the grate
but some blunt, black-leaded garland? The recital is wearisome, but the
retribution of the flower is precisely weariness. It is the persecution
of man, the haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his
inconsiderable brain.

The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to the
smallest of the things he has abused. The designer of cheap patterns is
no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitory
author by the phrase. But I had rather learn my decoration of the
Japanese, and place against the blank wall one pot plain from the wheel,
holding one singular branch in blossom, in the attitude and accident of