It is scarcely necessary to point out that the bigger and more ambitious
the house, the more perfect its appointments must be. If your house has a
great Georgian dining-room, the table should be set with Georgian or an
_earlier_ period English silver. Furthermore, in a "great" dining-room,
all the silver should be real! "Real" meaning nothing so trifling as
"sterling," but genuine and important "period" pieces made by Eighteenth
Century silversmiths, such as de Lamerie or Crespell or Buck or Robertson,
or perhaps one of their predecessors. Or if, like Mrs. Oldname, you live
in an old Colonial house, you are perhaps also lucky enough to have
inherited some genuine American pieces made by Daniel Rogers or Paul
Revere! Or if you are an ardent admirer of Early Italian architecture and
have built yourself a Fifteenth Century stone-floored and frescoed or
tapestry-hung dining room, you must set your long refectory table with a
"runner" of old hand-linen and altar embroidery, or perhaps Thirteenth
Century damask and great cisterns or ewers and beakers in high-relief
silver and gold; or in Callazzioli or majolica, with great bowls of fruit
and church candlesticks of gilt, and even follow as far as is practicable
the crude table implements of that time. It need not be pointed out that
Twentieth Century appurtenances in a Thirteenth or Fifteenth Century room
are anachronisms. But because the dining-table in the replica of a palace
(whether English, Italian, Spanish or French) may be equipped with great
"standing cups" and candelabra so heavy a man can scarcely lift one, it
does not follow that all the rest of us who live in medium or small
houses, should attempt anything of the sort. Nothing could be more out of
proportion--and therefore in worse taste. Nor is it necessary, in order to
have a table that is inviting, to set it with any of the completely
exquisite things which all people of taste long for, but which are
possessed (in quantity at least) only through wealth, inheritance, or
"collector's luck."
=A PLEASING DINING-ROOM AT LIMITED COST=
Enchanting dining-rooms and tables have been achieved with an outlay
amounting to comparatively nothing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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