In a fine panelled room which gave, through two large windows, upon the privy gardens of Whitehall Palace, a lady and a gentleman were seated as far apart as the limits of the chamber would permit. She, in her place, worked at a sampler, or affected to work; and he, in his, read in a book, or affected to read. The room was such as, with the best will in the world, we cannot, lacking its appropriate human furniture, preserve, or reproduce, in these days without vital loss to its character. We may possess the sombre panels, the rich-hued pictures with their gilded frames sufficiently illuminating the austerity, the Venetian glass girandoles, reflecting in the polished floor below, as in water, their starry opalescences; we may have, or acquire, the brass-studded, or the stamped leather, or the screw-railed chairs, the elaborately carved or the gate-legged tables, the priceless Persian rugs--which, by the by, are but an early fashion resumed--the gilt caskets and the silvered mirrors: we can _not_, unless to bring great ridicule upon ourselves, wear the long lovelocks down our cheeks, or the silk favours at our shoulders, or the jewelled cravats and beribboned hose and breeches, without which all the rest must figure but as an anachronism, a discordance, an Elgin marble ravished from its Parthenon, and lined up for show in a glass-roofed museum. That we do try to reconcile the irreconcilable in these matters, using Early English cradles as receptacles for our faggots, and hanging up our silk hats in antique ambries, is due to the fact that we have lost the art, or the instinct, for decorative appropriateness. In those remote but less “original” days the same mind that conceived the idol adorned its shrine. But if fashions in dress change and change, there was never in all history but one fashion in human moods and tempers. Those, whether figured in love, hate, desire, or jealousy, have been worn since the Fall to the single unchangeable pattern which wrought and accompanied it. One could not, in fact, from the fashion of their minds, have distinguished these two seated apart from any ill-assorted married couple of to-day.