In these days of "decorative art," it is necessary to say something about the aspect of a dining-room and its ornamentation. Doubtless the best ornament for a dining-room is a well-cooked dinner, but that dinner will taste all the better in a room that is rationally furnished, agreeably decorated, and heated just to the right point.

As regards the furnishing and decoration, much must be left to individual taste ; at the same time there is reason to protest against two influences which are equally irrational, the one French, and the other English, and both resulting in making a dining-room a sombre and severe place. There is no reason why the darker shades of green, brown, and red, should be reserved for dining-rooms; I have eaten delightfully in a room where the panelling was painted pale lilac, picked out with blue and salmon red; and against this background the ladies, with fresh flowers in their hair, stood out like a spring meadow against a vernal sky. It is not forbidden to make a dining-room gay in tone. The fur-niture is not necessarily of dark mahogany or oak. The Henri II. dining-room, now so fashionable, with its heavy curtains and portieres, its monumental fire-places, mantels, and andirons, and its walls decked out with arms, bibelots, tapestries, and what not, is the most unreasonable of all dining-rooms. All tapestry, portieres, hangings, bibelots, and other such things are objectionable, because they absorb the odors given forth by the drinks and viands. The display of armor on the walls is a silly affectation. There is no excuse whatever for converting a dining-room into a museum, and for this reason one does not wish to see the walls hung over with plates and dishes. The proper place for plates and dishes when not in use is in a cupboard, or on the shelves of a drawer. All archaic decoration is peculiarly out of place in a dining-room, where the principal object, the table, when laid out for breakfast or for dinner, is radically and absolutely modern. This room seems to me peculiarly worthy of the attention of our modern decorative artists, who might deliver us from the heavy and pompous splendor of the English, and of the silly feudalism and baronialism of the French Henri II. room, if they would only consent to neglect fashion, and apply their reasoning powers to the solution of the problem.

A host may show his personality and his taste in the arrangement of his dining-room as much as in his dress, or in his conversation, and yet nowhere do we see so little originality. People are singularly conservative in all that concerns the art of entertaining. The finest dinners nowadays are terribly monotonous; over and over again the same menu is served in the same way and in the same conditions of milieu and decoration. The dining-room need not be a dark-toned, impersonal place of immutable aspect. That correct gentleman, Comte Mole, when he received one of his friends of the diplomatic corps, would place in his salle a manger plants, flowers, and pictures which reminded his guest of his fatherland. Lord Lonsdale carried his refinement so far as to have a series of dining-rooms with hangings, furniture, and porcelain appropriate in tone to the color of the hair and the kind of beauty of the lady he was feting. On a less grandiose scale, I know an amiable hostess in London whose dining-room walls are covered with a rose-colored Louis XVI. striped silk, and who has the two maids who serve at table dressed in colors and patterns that harmonize with the walls of the room.

In a dining-room the aim of the decorator should be simplicity and gayety of aspect; and the materials which he may best use are wainscoting, or lambris, of the styles of Louis XIII., XIV., XV., and XVI., or of modern design, if he can find a designer, stucco, lacquered woodwork, panelling filled in with stamped leather, or decorative painting, neo-Greek decoration, simple panelling, either of natural wood or of wood painted in plain colors, or, finally, simple wall-paper, only let it be remembered that the paper need not be of dark hue.

Madame de Pompadour's dining-room at Bellevue was decorated with hunting and fishing scenes by Oudry, and the attributes of these sports were repeated on the woodwork carved by Verbreck.

In a little novelette by Bastide, called "La Petite Maison," we find a curious contemporary description of a dining-room in one of those elegant villas where the rich Frenchmen of the eighteenth century indulged their tastes for refinement and luxury of all kinds. "The walls," we read,"are covered with stucco of various colors, executed by the celebrated Clerici. The compartments, or panels, contain bass-reliefs of stucco, modelled by the famous Falconet, who has represented the fetes of Comus and of Bacchus. The trophies which adorn the pilasters of the decoration are by Vasse, and represent hunting, fishing, the pleasures of the table, those of love, etc.; and from each of these trophies, twelve in number, springs a candelabrum, or torchtre, with six branches." I recommend architects and amateurs to read the great architect Blondel's two volumes on "La Distribution des Maisonsde Plaisance" (Paris, 1737), where they will see how great was the refinement of the French in the eighteenth century, and, above all, how delicate the tonalities of lilac, blue, rose, and bright grays which they preferred to give to the walls of their dwellings. At the end of the eighteenth century the influence of the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum naturally made itself felt, and the dining-rooms of the Directory and of the First Empire were arranged in the antique fashion with stucco or marble, adorned with columns and pilasters, and friezes, either with bare walls or with walls decorated with stucco bass-reliefs, or Pompeian arabesques. The neo-Greek or Pompeian style still has its' advocates. During the second empire, Prince Napoleon had a Pompeian palace built in the Avenue Montaigne, at Paris, from de 'signs by M. Alfred Normand. In this palace, which is in reality only a very modest villa, the dining-room is lighted by a large window divided into three, by two pilasters; the ceiling is panelled in caissons, and the walls are panelled in red, blue, and yellow, which colors serve as the ground for the most delicate ornamentation that the Pompeian style created - slender columns, trellises, long filaments of plants, light garlands, blond or vermeil fruits, bows of ribbon, birds, cups, musical instruments, chimeres, intermingled discreetly with ears of corn, fish, and game, which reveal the intention of the room without sating the eyes before sating the stomach, as is often the result of our modern game and fruit pieces, fitter to serve as a sign for a butcher's shop than as a vision to be placed before the eyes of delicate gourmets.

Some of the dining-rooms of the Directory epoch which still remain, or of which we have drawings, must have been very pleasant to the eye. A typical house of that period was one designed by the architect and decorator Bellanger, for a celebrity of the epoch, Mademoiselle Dervieux. The basis of the decoration of her dining-room was gray, white, and yellow stucco; the over-doors were bass-reliefs of white stucco on Wedgewood-blue ground, the doors of unpolished mahogany with medallions and panels in yellow wood, framed with silver fillets and painted with arabesques and subjects, the pilasters of Sienna yellow covered with silver arabesques. Some elaborate specimens of this style of decoration may be seen in several of the Russian imperial palaces. I do not absolutely recommend the Directory style for imitation, but there are valuable hints to be obtained from the tender-colored and often tasteful arrangements of that period. In England, the painter Whistler has contributed his mite of influence towards emancipating people from the traditional dinginess and sombre tones of dining-room furniture and decoration. The painter's own dining-room is canary yellow, with blue and white china as a decoration. A famous dining-room, designed and painted by Whistler, for Mr. Leyland's house, is pale blue and pale gold, covered with arabesques that suggest the motif of peacocks and their feathers. The only decoration of this room is composed of decorative peacock panels on the shutters of the windows, and on the walls a collection of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain arranged on gilt shelves.