Coarse and carefully woven linens, used as I have indicated, are really far better than old tapestries for modern houses, because the design can be adapted to the specific purpose and the texture itself can be easily cleaned and is more appropriate to the close walls and less airy rooms of this century.

For costly wall-decoration, leather is another of the substances which have had a past of pomp and magnificence, and carries with it, in addition to beauty, a suggestion of the art of a race.  Spanish leather, with its stamping and gilding, is quite as costly a wall covering as antique or modern tapestry, and far more indestructible.  Perhaps it is needlessly durable as a mere vehicle for decoration.  At all events Japanese artists and artisans seem to be of this opinion, and have transferred the same kind of decoration to heavy paper, where for some occult reason—­although strongly simulating leather—­it seems not only not objectionable, but even meritorious.  This is because it simply transfers an artistic method from a costly substance, to another which is less so, and the fact may even have some weight that paper is a product of human manufacture, instead of human appropriation of animal life, for surely sentiment has its influence in decoration as in other arts.

Wood panelling is also a form of interior treatment which has come to us by inheritance from the past as well as by right of natural possession.  It has a richness and sober dignity of effect which commends it in large or small interiors, in halls, libraries, and dining-rooms, whether they are public or private; devoted to grand functions, or to the constantly recurring uses of domesticity.  Wood is so beautiful a substance in itself, and lends itself to so many processes of ornamentation, that hardly too much can be said of its appropriateness for interior decoration.  From the two extremes of plain pine panellings cut into squares or parallelograms by machinery, and covered with paint in tints to match door and window casings, to the most elaborate carvings which back the Cathedral stalls or seats of ecclesiastical dignity, it is always beautiful and generally appropriate in use and effect, and that can hardly be said of any other substance.  There are wainscotted rooms in old houses in Newport, where, under the accumulated paint of one or two centuries, great panels of old Spanish mahogany can still be found, not much the worse for their long eclipse.  Such rooms, in the original brilliancy of colour and polish, with their parallel shadings of mahogany-red reflecting back the firelight from tiled chimney-places and scattering the play of dancing flame, must have had a beauty of colour hard to match in this day of sober oak and painted wainscottings.

[Illustration:  PAINTED CANVAS FRIEZE]

[Illustration:  BUCKRAM FRIEZE FOR DINING-ROOM]