as much real art and taste, and honesty of design, and of workmanship in fire—irons, as in most of the pictures that are exhibited at the Royal Academy. I always feel when I see these in a good many old Welsh homes that we have there the highest of the elementary requisites of art, viz., fittingness for the work they have to perform, taste in design, and thorough honesty in workmanship.
Then look at the furniture. I need not recall to your memory the quite modern furniture of most of our houses, the gim-crack things they are, the miserable things without shape or form, which very quickly give way, give way to any man of considerable weight, and which have nothing in them either of character or of attraction, and nothing in them which would mark them out as forms of furniture which are meant, not alone for one generation, but for a succession of generations, so that the association and the tenderness and the love of home should imperceptibly and unconsciously be carried on even in the very furniture and the very atmosphere and surroundings of hearth and home.
