AS I near the end of my book, I am prepared for the inevitable cry: 'We have not been told what to do. There is not a word about the drawing-room - nor the bed-room - nor the kitchen - not a hint what colour is proper for this room, or what material for that!'

Would not such dogmatism be in total contradiction to my first principles, most indolent lambs? It is the upholsterer's, the penny-a-liner's, the tyro's business to frame laws as of the Medes and Persians about that which is independent of small shackles - it is mine to emancipate you from their ignorant tyranny. There is no ought in beauty, save your own feeling of delight, and it is only the pleasure of the majority which determines art rules; and the more capable you are of comparing one sensation with another, in fact, the more you cultivate your eyes and minds, and the more fastidious you become in arranging pleasant accessories, the higher is the form of beauty resultant from your efforts. A very little, any bright scrap, pleases the uneducated man, and to him it is beauty. As his brain develops by study of its impressions and its favourite associations, he is less easily satisfied; demands change, relief from the intensity of this or that sensation of pleasure or pain. But comfort, pleasantness, propriety, on which beauty depends, can only be determined by the nerves themselves, and as the faculties of individuals differ, like their figures, the blatant customs of consecrating this wood to the dining-room, that to the boudoir - this fabric to the chair, that to the curtain - deprive our homes of all character, and English art of all vigour.

When beauty is tied down in a trap, she has the faculty of evading it; like the lark in the Chinese palace, wherein she could not sing as in the wild free woods.

Art is long, though life and its laws are brief. I have tried to show how the broad principles enunciated in my first chapters have been borne out by all the schools of art furniture.

In the fourteenth-century room, the mass of monotone necessary to relieve the bright frescoes, tapestries, and costumes was provided - perhaps by dirt - certainly by the broad shadows inseparable from low-pitched rooms with thick walls and small windows. In a Louis XIV. room, the necessary monotone was sought by the artificially chequered glow of Boule furniture, lighted up at certain points artistically by metal mounts; the Stuart room had its dark oak wainscot and furniture, the Georgian had its mottled wood-marquetry, and damask walls; the Louis Seize room provided plenteous grey by means of its blended opal tints. Against a monotone all bright objects look doubly effective; but the monotone must not be monotonous, it must be broken tip discreetly; not by small contrasting objects which have a spotty effect, but by carefully regulated tones of similar tint. A shady room requires no mass of monotone from the decorator, it has it by nature.

No artist allows a large unbroken mass of one colour in his picture, but he as carefully avoids patchiness and spots. It is far more difficult to blend bright colours beautifully than dull ones; but the bright colours are best, after all; the sunny fields are fairer than the gloomy ones, though of both we may say, 'behold, it is very good.'

If there were a fixed law that only one kind of art had a sound basis - what would have become of all the schools, all fresh effort, and honest ambition? we should have had no choice offered us from this land or that.

We are free: let us use our freedom with discretion and kindliness.