R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Women Novelists of the 'Seventies 73pacifying and, if one was then a child in these matters, alittle pathetic. Manners, habits, hobbies, dress, furniture,food, frivolities—how swiftly the dreadful charge ofquaintness can be brought against them.Here, for example, is an interior, admirably informed,but closely resembling the pell-mell of an auction-room,yet still as inhabitable as a dream. We have mounted thesteps into a prosperous city man's London mansion, inthe days when dozens of young stockbrokers, 'more orless jewelled, white-hatted and blue-era vatted, were to beseen flitting to and fro about Mark Lane... any sunshinymorning between March and October'.There was the suite of reception rooms, three in number—theyellow damask room, the blue satin room, and the crimson velvetroom—all panelled with enormous looking-glasses, lit by chandelierslike pendent fountains, and crowded with gilded furniture,pictures in heavy Italian frames, tables of Florentine mosaic,cabinets in buhl and marqueterie, ormolu clocks, and expensivetrifles from all quarters of the globe. Here was nothing antique—nothing rare, save for its costliness. Here were no old masters, nopriceless pieces of majolica, no Cellini caskets, no enamels, nointagli, no Etruscan tazza, no Pompeian relics; but in their placegreat vases of the finest modern Sevres; paintings by Frith,Maclise, Stanfield, Meissonier, and David Roberts; bronzes byBarbedienne; Chinese ivory carvings, and wonderful clockworktoys from Geneva. The malachite tabic in the boudoir from theInternational Exhibition of 1851; the marble group in the alcoveat the end of the third drawing-room was by Marochetti; theGobelin tapestries were among the latest products of the Imperiallooms. Money, in short, was there omnipresent—money inabundance; and even taste. But not taste of the highest order.Not that highly trained taste which seems to 'run' in certainclasses of society, like handsome hands or fine complexions.It is a museum piece, after Gibbon, but, alas, the interveningyears seem to have put it under glass.A dining-room, on the other hand, from The Wooing OHexhibits taste of an order high enough at least to satisfythe first-cousin of an earl, and a fastidious cousin at that:... A most dainty apartment it was: the walls a pale grey,