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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1879 edition. Excerpt: ...shop, to the country-house, or to the flames. Chap, Iv. The Restoration brought back the Rococo with all its faults and weaknesses, and none of its virtues. As for ourselves, we have preserved its colorlessness, its monotony of gray tones, its senseless shell-work, and its unnaturally curved lines, but we have lost its modicum of originality, its lively though capricious humor, its charm, its delicacy and refine ment. The Rococo of the nineteenth century is thoroughly unattractive, nor has it gained anything by its alliance with naturalism through the use of flowers. Still it stands its ground against all attacks, whether of the Gothic, the Renaissance, or the antique, and it does so because it is the chief element of modern French taste. Only the very latest efforts at reform in the field of taste and industrial art15 Chap. Iv. have been able seriously to threaten it, --efforts which are based upon the resolve to test the value of all that has fancied itself beyond the reach of criticism; to supply an aesthetic standard; to obviate what is objectionable by the diffusion of sounder knowledge; and to substitute for it that which is better, and which rests upon really existing though hitherto. unrecognized laws. It cannot be doubted that the efforts made in our day to diffuse aesthetic knowledge and promote sound taste will be rated in future histories of the latter half, of the nineteenth century as one of its most striking features. As yet we cannot fairly estimate the importance of what has been done in our day towards ultimate progress, by the establishment of such institutions as the Industrial Museums of Europe, and above all of their model and superior, the Kensington Museum, with its dependent schools, which last year gave..