The fashionable practice of modelling rooms too severely upon a single period is open to grave objections. It binds fetters of iron on the owner, who can never work-in any new element, however beautiful. It seems to destroy all liberty of action; and, moreover, when the room is inhabited, the sense of propriety is outraged by the impossibility of confining the dresses of the guests - or, indeed, the manners and customs - to the required limit. A newspaper or a piano is an anachronism in a real Queen Anne (not ' Empire') room, and I know Queen Annites who consistently banish both. Tea would be an anachronism in a Tudor room; or at least, if used, it ought to be spoken of by its native name tcha (tea, with accented a), as it was in this country when it first appeared, being written chaw here in 1615, and chia by the Portuguese.

Sensitiveness to anachronisms naturally increases with attention, but too severe consistency - fair enough as an antiquarian freak - when elevated into a system seems to me intolerable, since our walls and furniture were made for us, not we for them.

Still, a happy liberty must not be confounded with outlawry - a feverish effort to be different from others often results in disagreeable eccentricities - but that some sort of harmony with surroundings is needful in dress and bearing I shall strive to show. It stands to reason that (short of preparing a 'specimen room,' or a museum for reference only) it is better to allow some latitude to modern tastes and requirements than to trammel all the guests with laws and liveries, or to have to suffer in silence the incongruity one has learnt to feel too acutely.

Without tiresome adherence to a given date, we must study unity of plan, and banish all really discordant elements. For instance, a room furnished noticeably in the Georgian style should not contain obtrusive Victorian manufactures. A very Japanese room should not be marred by early English work, such as would be unlikely to reach Japan. On the other hand, a Georgian room may contain Jacobean furniture; a Jacobean room may take hints from old Japan or Egypt, for objects of contemporary or earlier date may be assumed to have a possible right in the room, which those of a later date cannot have by any stretch of imagination. Similarly, Chinese art would be fish-out-of-waterish in an early English home. China was not opened up till the sixteenth century, and modern Chinese work would be ill-placed in a Jacobean room, as it would dispel the illusion of antiquity, and at once betray that the room was spurious, or that modern additions and excrescences were being added.

Such things might fairly be carried by the present generation into an antique dwelling place, but they would always look ' out of keeping' and uncomfortable. This makes, in my opinion, a room avowedly eclectic easier to manage and more suitable to modern wants than any other. Good taste, which means sensibility and discrimination, will decide what incongruity means, and what principle or system is to govern the arrangement, leaving a margin for accidents and after-thoughts, and bearing in mind throughout that a room is not an ornament independent of circumstances, but chiefly an accessory and support to beings who move and change continually.

It is this very fact which endows us with liberty to suit our own taste, or the varying tastes of a family, in a room; and when the meaning of harmony is rightly understood, we see that it means not only a simple, impoverished cadence like a slight air played by one hand, but it admits of complex and even elaborate development. Indeed, you may play with colours, as with notes, so as to satisfy all ears. The key may be in the main major or minor, the tone may be high or low as you wish it, but harmony is vowed neither to simplicity nor exuberance; either may be harmonious, either discordant. You may attain a harmonious effect by the redundance of elements, such as hangings, furniture, china, pictures, and all ornaments, however many and various; or you may attain it by the paucity of elements. Nothing but an 'eye' for beauty can arrange either little or much well, so as not to weary or satiate. And if you cultivate your eye, you will arrange your own house better than any decorator can do it for you, and you will avoid the badge of a 'Smith house' or a 'Brown house.'