"Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear,"

rich in the splendid literature of England, and faithful lover both of the teeming city and the ripe old books, Lamb speaks to English hearts in a language they can understand. And we, his neighbors, whom he recked not of, hold him just as dear; for his spleenless humor is an inheritance of our mother tongue, one of the munificent gifts which England shares with us, and for which no payment is possible save the frank and generous recognition of a pleasure that is without peer.

THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY: A

SPECULATION.

MR. FREDERICK HARRISON, in a caustic little paper on the Esthete, has taken occasion to say some severely truthful things anent the dreary grandeur of rich men's houses, where each individual object is charming in itself, and out of harmony with all the rest. "I believe," he observes sadly, "that the camel will have passed through the eye of the needle before the rich man shall have found his way to enter the Kingdom of Beauty. It is a hard thing for him to enjoy art at all. The habits of the age convert him into a patron, and the assiduity of the dealers deprive him of peace.”

Is it, then, the mere desire to be obliging which induces a millionaire to surround himself with things which he does not want, which nobody else wants, and which are perpetually in the way of comfort and pleasure? Does he build and furnish his house to support the dealers, to dazzle his friends, or to increase his

own earthly happiness and well-being? The serious fashion in which he goes to work admits of no backsliding, no merciful deviations from a relentless luxury. I have seen ghastly summer palaces, erected presumably for rest and recreation, where the miserable visitor was conducted from a Japanese room to a Dutch room, and thence to something Early English or Florentine; and such a jumble of costly incongruities, of carved scrolls and blue tiles and bronze screens and stained glass, was actually dubbed a home. A home! The guest, surfeited with an afternoon's possession, could escape to simpler scenes; but the master of the house was chained to all that tiresome splendor for five months of the year, and the sole compensation he appeared to derive from it was the saturnine delight of pointing out to small processions of captive friends every detail which they would have preferred to overlook. It is a painful thing, at best, to live up to one's bricabrac, if one has any; but to live up to the bricabrac of many lands and of many centuries is a strain which no wise man would dream of inflicting upon his constitution.

Perhaps the most unlovely circumstance

about the "palatial residences of our country is that everything in them appears to have been bought at once. Everything is equally new, and equally innocent of any imprint of the owner's personality. He has not lived among his possessions long enough to mould them to his own likeness, and very often he has not even selected them himself. I have known whole libraries purchased in a week, and placed en masse upon their destined shelves; whole rooms furnished at one fell swoop with all things needful, from the chandelier in the ceiling to the Dresden figures in the cabinet. I have known people who either mistrusted their own tastes, or who had no tastes to mistrust, and so surrendered their houses to upholsterers and decorators, giving them carte blanche to do their best or worst. A room which has been the unresisting prey of an upholsterer is, on the whole, the saddest thing that money ever bought; yet its deplorable completeness calls forth rapturous commendations from those who can understand no natural line of demarcation between a dwelling-place and a shop. The same curious delight in handsome things,

apart from any beauty or fitness, has resulted in our over-ornamented Pullman cars, with their cumbrous and stuffy hangings; and in the aggressive luxury of our ocean steamers, where paint and gilding run riot, and every scrap of wall space bears its burden of inappropriate decoration. To those for whom a sea voyage is but a penitential pilgrimage, the fat frescoed Cupids and pink roses of the saloons offer no adequate compensation for their sufferings; whitewash and hangings of sackcloth would harmonize more closely with their sentiments. Yet these ornate embellishments pursue them now even to the solitude of their staterooms, and the newest steamers boast of cabins where the wretched traveler, too ill to arise from his berth, may be solaced by Cupids of his own frisking nakedly over the wash-bowl, and by pink roses in profusion festooning his narrow cell. If he can look at them without loathing, he is to be envied his unequaled serenity of mind.

It is strange that the authors who have written so much about luxury, whether they praise it satirically, like Mandeville, or con