it; at its best it was a sort of blind protest against the patterns of
chair-covers that the eye was bound to absorb while listening to the
inanities of drawing-room conversation. It is significant that the
æsthetic movement was a man's movement. Until the leader of the movement
appeared on the scene, the decoration of the Victorian, as distinct from
the Georgian parlour, or that of every other period, was woman's
business. Most of the Victorian patterns embodied naturalistic and
sentimental representations of flowers. It was with the disappearance of
the eighteenth-century tradition, when drawing-room decoration passed
out of the hands of men, that beauty disappeared. Women took to heaping
masses of drapery on to the mantelpieces which had once displayed
classic proportion; on to this drapery they pinned all sorts of horrible
fans. Du Maurier exposed it all, and he exposed, too, the æsthetes to
whom the salvation of the appearance of a suburban drawing-room could
come to mean more than anything else in life. Their fault was not
confined to this. He always brought their "intensity" as a charge
against them, for it is of the very genius of good manners to merely
froth about things which, if taken seriously, would tend to destroy
amenity.

[Illustration: Illustration for "A Legend of Camelot"--Part III.

_Punch_, March 17, 1866.

A little castle she drew nigh,
With seven towers twelve inches high....
O Miserie!

A baby castle, all a-flame
With many a flower that hath no name,