In the choice of papers, a person must look to the adaptation of tints for different rooms, choosing bright or even brilliant shades for the dining-room, bronze shades with slight points of gold for a library, slight soft shades of blue or light-grey for bed-rooms, and rich cream colors with perhaps a little gold for the parlor or drawing-room. The patterns or forms best suited to the size and shape of the rooms can then be selected.

Long, perpendicular lines, as it is well known, lead the eye up, and give an impression of height to an apartment that no other combination can realize. Figures whose predominating lines are horizontal lower the appearance of the room, while large, detached patterns at regular distances tire the eye and the mind with the constant tendency to count and recombine them; and besides, they compete so powerfully with other objects on the walls, such as pictures and bric-a-brac, and they disturb the effect of background to people or furniture so completely, that this class of forms is, perhaps, of all others, the most to be condemned. The scintillating effects of small figures render them the most suitable for wall-papers.

Of the numerous changes and improvements in all departments of art, none is more remarkable than the rapid advance made in wall decorations and paper-hangings. Wall-papers, with humming-birds and gigantic roses on a sea-greenish background, have happily become antiquated, and an ugly or too conspicuous wall-paper is now the exception, not the rule. Wall-papers as now produced, are the result of a comparatively well-educated taste.