Edgar Allan Poe

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

In the internal decoration, if not in the external architecture of their residences, the English aresupreme. The Italians have but little sentiment beyond marbles and colours. In France, melioraprobant, deteriora sequuntur-the people are too much a race of gadabouts to maintain thosehousehold proprieties of which, indeed, they have a delicate appreciation, or at least the elements ofa proper sense. The Chinese and most of the eastern races have a warm but inappropriate fancy. TheScotch are poor decorists. The Dutch have, perhaps, an indeterminate idea that a curtain is not acabbage. In Spain they are all curtains-a nation of hangmen. The Russians do not furnish. TheHottentots and Kickapoos are very well in their way. The Yankees alone are preposterous. How this happens, it is not difficult to see. We have no aristocracy of blood, and having thereforeas a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, thedisplay of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display inmonarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and which might have been as readilyforeseen, we have been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself. To speak less abstractly. In England, for example, no mere parade of costly appurtenances wouldbe so likely as with us, to create an impression of the beautiful in respect to the appurtenancesthemselves-or of taste as regards the proprietor: -this for the reason, first, that wealth is not, inEngland, the loftiest object of ambition as constituting a nobility; and secondly, that there, the truenobility of blood, confining itself within the strict limits of legitimate taste, rather avoids than affectsthat mere costliness in which a parvenu rivalry may at any time be successfully attempted