The Milan exchange. (Milan, Gibson County, Tenn.) 1874-1978, 1880-08-19
Forty Years AGO. and Now.

MtiNg VI AiAC liiiAtAACA ANtAQElo Itiil Z
member the time when absolute sim
plicity-one might better say baldnes.
was the order of the day, both in per
sonal toilette and house-furnishing. II
| those DAYS a dwelling with STAINED
glass in any OF the windows, no matter
ON what well or wall it looked, wouC
have been held a curiosity, an eccen
! tricitv, if not an aifectation or absurditl
and a dress trimmed with peacock
feathers would have been an atrocity
But how have customs undergone {
change into something rich and strange
At that time the sampler and the family
tree, and the lady at the tomb, under
weeping willows and with big hand.
kerchief, having been relegated to an
other abode, four prints in gilt frames
one on each wall, or possibly couple
of crude portraits occupying the place
or one of them, made parlOr elegant
and almost artistic; and not many even
of the better class of pariOrs in the
country had as much as that. always &C.
cepting, of course, those old colonial
mansions that rejOiced in " Smyberts'
and " Copleys."
The city, however, always in advance
reached elegance and an inhabited APP
pearance much earlier than the country
at large, and drawing-rooms were dark.
ened and crowded there first, and there
were paintings and statuary in them be-
fore those objects travelled farther, and
there were portieres, and screens, and
plaques, and brass-work, and bric-a-brac
nnnrol IL ,rrpr1ld or ho tnr
to know the Thoughts of some good
country mdtron of forty years
ago should she be suddenly in
troduced upon the scene of one of the
blue-green" parlors of to-day, with
its old bronze and china and repoussee,
and beveled glass, and Kensington nee
dle-work, its dark walls, and multiplied
mantels, shelf over shelf, its short cur
tains and long curtains, its huge vases
and little panels, and all the rest. What
a desert was that old parlor to this!
This, which if little overcrowded and
giving scarcely rest enough to eye or
mind, is yet crowded only with beauty
and suggestion of beauty, every object
in it being intended only to produce
harmonious effects and sensations of
satisfaction, bringing to mind bits of
history, and attainments in art, and all
the poetical sides of life.
We are inclined to think there can be
no doubt but that the modern parfor
has the right of it. We can not see that
the moral forces are necessarily strength
ened by daily contact with bare walls;
while it seems to us that the nature, in
stead of being enlarged by the absence
of agreeable ornament, will be con-
stantly returned upon itself, and mar
rowed by the absence of objects stimu-
lating the fancy and leading the thought
outward. And certainly the intellectu-
al forces in almost every such instance
are starved, and where one is of such
build that he chances to be improved
by the concentration of thought that
such ascetic dwellings might foster,
others are only dwarfed and withered.
As great a change, also, has been
wrought in the personal toilette as in
the arrangements of the drawing-room.
Who does not remember hideous fe-
male dress, puckered at the waist, with
an enormously full, straight, ugly skirt.
usually without flounce, or tuck, or fold?
Of course not even the ugliness of dress
could take away from the sweetness of
youth when youth wore it; but in
itself nothing could be more de-
void of grace or good looks, and
one recalls it with a shudder.
And those dear women who wore it
would themselves have shuddered had
any one proposed to them either the
clinging statuesque drapery of the pres
ent or some of its combinations of color.
Who of them would not have denounced
savagely the wearing of two shades of
the same color at once? Who of them
would have dared so to outrage decency
and morals as to wear light blue with
alive green, although all the landscapes
under heaven were guilty of it? And
who of them would have worn on the
same dress deep garnet and pale pink
to please the finest dress-maker in all
Paris, and although the reddest of red
roses bloom in all the shades of pale
blush to richest crimson in the whorls
of one flower? What would any of
them have thought of themselves had
they put on such fantastic ornament as
for earrings, or arrows, as
japanese fans for breastpins, as bangles
and Montague curls and clustered into
the use of one all the charmingly absurd
notions of every generation? And what
would all or any of them have said to
see our beauties dressed, as an every
day affair, in the costumes of the courts
Of half a dozen different empires and
eras and making drawing-rooms look as
if peOpled with shadows from Dante
Rosetti's sonnets, or figures out of the
golden twilight of William NORRIS
pages?
Yet, in our opinion, if the aesthetic
mind of the present generation did no
more than thus to educate the taste, or
to present the question for considera-
ton, of what inventions or adaptations
in the line of loneliness weighed the
most in the decoration of our parlors
and our persons, it would be doing a
good work. For it is accomplishing
at any rate when it merely
pleases the eye, that gateway of soul
and brain; and when it brings beauty
into the general service that it has new
er known before, teaching its many
sided aspects to all, it is following in the
path of that holy Methodist who set his