To ornament our house discreetly, so that we may always find a pleasure in the sitting down, a harmony all over that will soothe us after our day's work; a quiet _colourless_ patterned paper will be as cheap as a gaudy glaring, and will _comfort_ you where the other will not;--a knowledge of how little is wanted to make life pleasant, a method to get true style, and save money, an idea of the decoration or useful laws of colour;--a taste in the way of books and dress and behaviour, a general _blandness_, which etiquette aims at, improving the high _tone_, which some aristocrats have, and some must pretend to learn, and which may be acquired by any one studying the first law of Christianity, which selfishness, and coarseness, and falseness cannot successfully imitate or keep up for long, no matter what title comes before or after their names, or the pedigree they may be able to tot up, or the appearance their tailor or dressmaker may give to them;--which only require the instincts of honour and truth to do it all to perfection. It does not really matter whether you use your bread or fork or knife at the orthodox moment; if you can keep down the scoff or the sneer where another has tripped. The fork or knife mistakes only want a hint to rectify, the sneer or scoff cannot be rectified, for the one has been the want of knowledge, while the other has been the want of soul: the one is a _novice_, to be trained; the other a _cad_, to be kicked. That there are tastes acquired, and instincts born in us, we all have hourly and abundant proofs. But the love of ornament I take to be an instinct bred in the bone and born with the breath. We have records when and how the world began, but never a record of the beginning of ornament. Adam saw that Eve was fair to look upon, and she, I doubt not, long before the serpent tempted her, knew of a method to deck up her tresses so as to increase the fascination. In this world, and age, and short life, when science has taught us the fallacy of our eyesight, and the imperfection of those organs which the Creator gave to us and called good; when knowledge must be concentrated and bottled into the mind like a quintessence, over-proof, we have no time for wandering amongst words; with our girls, scientific and exact, Cupid must learn to be brief with what he has to tell and not dally with soft nothings. Language must be chosen for its directness rather than for its elegance, if the speaker would not be flung aside like the useless rubbish his weak flourishes have made him.