Soane, and other contemporary architects, had fallen into disfavour, there was first a reaction, and then an interregnum, as has been noticed in the previous chapter.  The Great Exhibition marked a fresh departure, and quickened, as we have seen, industrial enterprise in this country; and though, upon the whole, good results have been produced by the impetus given by these international competitions, they have not been exempt from unfavorable accompaniments.  One of these was the eager desire for novelty, without the necessary judgment to discriminate between good and bad.  For a time, nothing satisfied the purchaser of so-called “artistic” products, whether of decorative furniture, carpets, curtains or merely ornamental articles, unless the design was “new.”  The natural result was the production either of heavy and ugly, or flimsy and inappropriate furniture, which has been condemned by every writer on the subject.  In some of the designs selected from the exhibits of ’51 this desire to leave the beaten track of conventionality will be evident:  and for a considerable time after the exhibition there is to be seen in our designs, the result of too many opportunities for imitation, acting upon minds insufficiently trained to exercise careful judgment and selection.

[Illustration:  The Ellesmere Cabinet, In the Collection of the late Lady Marian Alford.]

The custom of appropriate and harmonious treatment of interior decorations and suitable furniture, seems to have been in a great measure abandoned during the present century, owing perhaps to the indifference of architects of the time to this subsidiary but necessary portion of their work, or perhaps to a desire for economy, which preferred the cheapness of painted and artificially grained pine-wood, with decorative effects produced by wall papers, to the more solid but expensive though less showy wood-panelling, architectural mouldings, well-made panelled doors and chimney pieces, which one finds, down to quite the end of the last century, even in houses of moderate rentals.  Furniture therefore became independent and “beginning to account herself an Art, transgressed her limits” ... and “grew to the conceit that it could stand by itself, and, as well as its betters, went a way of its own.” [22] The interiors, handed over from the builder, as it were, in blank, are filled up from the upholsterer’s store, the curiosity shop, and the auction room, while a large contribution from the conservatory or the nearest florist gives the finishing touch to a mixture, which characterizes the present taste for furnishing a boudoir or a drawing room.