Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/87

Rh of artistic incompetence which then prevailed. Since then, happily, design has been more studied. There is still a good deal of very sorry stuff produced—as far as artistic design is concerned—but at the same time there is much faithful copying of good antique work. All old work is not good; there were bad artists in the past, but the general taste was better than it is now. I was once in the shop of one of our foremost furniture dealers and decorators in town, when a young married couple came in to choose curtains and carpets for their new home. I had been talking with the head of the establishment about artistic furniture, and he had shown me carpets, curtains, and wall-papers, such as no designer in the fifteenth, sixteenth, or seventeenth centuries would have blushed to produce. The young couple passed all these samples by—blind to their merits, and pounced on and chose some atrocious stuff, bad in colour and bad in art. When they were gone, the proprietor turned to me: "You see," he said, "the public is still uncultivated; we are forced to keep rubbish in our trade to satisfy those whose taste does not rise above rubbish." Now it is the same with regard to lace. There is badly designed lace as well as that which is as good as anything drawn by a great master in the past. Let the public eye be discerning to choose the good and reject the evil, and then the poor lace-workers will not be set to produce stuff that never ought to have time, labour, eyesight devoted to it.

There are some trades that are hurtful to those employed in them. The lace-making by machinery at Nottingham is said to induce decline.