Excerpt from Household Furniture and Interior Decoration If any one felt a defire to decorate his habitation with furniture of fuperior elegance of form and of defign, unable, from the unfrequency of the demand, and from the confe quent inability of the artificer, to get any' fuch wrought at home, he was obliged to procure it from abroad. Often, at a great expenfe, he would only obtain'the refufe of foreign manufactures; and even, where he fucceeded in importing the choiceft productions of continental induftry, thefe only ferved to difcourage our own artifts, to diminifh the balance of trade in our favour, and, by a tacit acknowledgment of our infe riority in the arts of elegance and tafle, to raife the pride of foreigners at our expenfe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.