The Workship of Wreck, - as false a motive as the love of disease and disgust into which it developed - the reaction-from the love of beauty.

I may instance some of the furniture, however fine in detail, which recalled tombs, like the funereal ornaments which ladies decked themselves with; copies from sarcophagi adapted to tureens and flowerstands, architectural cabinets like dolls' churches, surmounted by that strange long-popular ornament, which can mean nothing but the broken pediment of a Greek temple - though this can scarcely have been generally understood, since the lines of the side-angles do not always correspond with those of the centre ones.

Such a value set on actual deformity, such admiration for not the beauty wrecked but the wreck itself, must be degraded and evil, the bathos of discrimination or 'taste.'

But on this pivot turn many works of eminent seventeenth century artists, viz., public buildings, secrt-taij-es and cabinets (their minute replicas), chests, jewellery, etc, because all the world was mad about ancient Rome and Greece, whose demolished greatness was just coming to light. Discrimination seemed moribund if not defunct. Anything would do to play at being classic with, just as nowadays anything will do to p!ay at being Queen Anne with. What else could be expected of people who parodied in their very dresses of velvet and lace (as I shall show) the hero's iron corslets and shoulder-pieces, and foisted the girt-up chitonia of marble goddesses on a farthingale and stomacher?

When the passion for antiquities thus developed into the worship of wreck - and when the worship of wreck was pushed a little farther by the craving for excitement, the result was so dismal that it is a moral in itself. The jaded appetkes, tired of pleasure, demanded a new shock, and whilst some of the pioneers, like Conser. atives, strove to confine-the sprouting fashions exclusively to classic precedent, others, like wild Radicals, ran forward and devised a school of ghastly ornament to produce the last weary titillation.