There is, alas, no one at Claridge’s or the Ritz or the Savoy to tell mothers who bring their girls over here to buy clothes and do the theatres, that there is also a way open to them to gain something that will still be theirs when the memory of the play has faded--in most cases let us hope so--and the clothes have been cast aside--since no one nowadays wears clothes long enough to wear them out. The South Kensington Museum is the finest museum of applied art in the world. That is why it is the Mecca of students who come here to study and draw inspiration from the lovely things fashioned by our forefathers in gold and silver and bronze and leather, in silk and lace and precious stones, in the furnishings and decorations of the houses and persons of other times and other nations. There are paintings and sculpture as well: the Raphael cartoons are one of the glories of the place. There is something, indeed, to appeal to everyone’s taste in this most marvellous museum. For the little schoolgirls who seem to throng the place in cohorts, in the charge of apathetic teachers, there are the dolls and dolls’ houses that their great-grandmothers played with--the former as delicately waxen and elegantly dressed as any to be found to-day. Furniture lovers may study here the finest specimens of every period, from the handsome Jacobean chairs and settles that harmonise so well with the background of panelled walls and decorated ceilings taken from old English houses, to the marvellous ornate escritoires, toilet tables and gilt couches of French royal palaces. There is less formality about the English furniture, but it was not more comfortable; and the heavy projecting carvings even on the back of the little children’s chairs may well have been the reason for the erect bearings used for odious comparisons in one’s youth. They say that the beds of our forefathers were comfortable. That may be true, but they were certainly depressing, and the state bed from Boughton House, Northampton, in which William III. slept, with its dingy hangings and horrible hearse-like plumes, reaching into the lofty roof, makes you thankful for the airier ideas of to-day. For book-lovers there are upstairs the old, old missals and books of hours, illuminated with such skill and patience by monks in mediæval monasteries--some with colours almost as perfect, the ink as black, the paper as white as when they were first executed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As marvellous, and perhaps even more exquisite as works of art, are the slender Persian volumes, love-poems and prayers, inscribed in delicate characters of the East, with pictures of shahs and houris, and leather covers, so wonderfully embossed and inlaid and beautifully coloured that no description could give the faintest idea of their perfection.