FRED.




LETTER XXIX.

From the Architect.

CONSISTENCY, COMFORT, AND CARPETS.


MY DEAR FRED: I don't despise the new fashions. I admire them--when
they are good. Will you please try to understand that a thing of
beauty is a joy _forever_? Whatever is born of truth, whether in art
or religion, belongs to eternity; it never goes out of fashion. Will
you also remember that modern styles, modes, fashions, inventions,--call
them what you will,--are the mere average product of human thought and
labor during a few years; the old that abides is drawn from the
superlatively good of former countless generations, culled over and
over again till that alone remains which has stood the test of your
critics and reformers all along down from Adam, or up from the last
monkey who wept to find his first-born without a tail and morally
accountable.

Certainly it is easier to say what to avoid than what to accept, for
there's more of it. Broad is the road of error, and the faults and
follies, vices and sins, that wrangle and riot therein, are thicker
than crickets on a sandy road in October,--thicker and blacker. You
may catch them all day and there'll be just as many left. But the