Excerpt from The Art of the House Should the inspiration of the moment dietate to you a command for walls light in colour, you must not, having once put your hand to the plough, entertain any idea Of looking back. That would be to ruin all. A fastidious chastity of form and site must be the order Of the day; your pieces of furniture, very refined, very fit, and very few, are to be disposed here and there after anxious premeditation and earnest thought. They must correspond in their design with the spirit Of the wall-papers, or the panelling, and be placed just there (and in no other position than that) where they will tell the most effeetively as patches of a darker tone; or you may choose to set the whole - walls, chairs, tables, and all - in a high key; only remembering that if this be done you must keep just as tight a rein over your fancy as though the plenishing were Of dark wood. A severe elegance scrupulously maintained and con Sistently carried out in every particular, is the main characteristic of this method; the colour Chord, limited though it be, will have an austere sweetness that falls in well with some tempera ments, but a jarring note were disastrous. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.