As is usual with customs unlike our own, and which we are therefore prone to regard as inferior to ours, there are excellent reasons for Cuban interior decoration, or rather the lack of it.

"Oh, they are only getting ready for the floral decorations," she said, "we give a reception to-morrow in honor of your return.

For even when the cave-man retreated from the advance of the polar cap, which once covered Europe with Arctic desolation, he not only defied the elements but showed even then the love of the sublime by beautifying the walls of his icy prison with those mural decorations which were the beginning of art.

The very employment of the gods for mere decoration bears this stamp.

Strawberry Hill had one merit, everything was in keeping: the internal decorations, the screens, the niches, the chimney-pieces, the book-shelves, were all Gothic; and most of these were designed by Horace himself; and, indeed, the description of Strawberry Hill is too closely connected with the annals of his life to be dissevered from his biography.

The man who invented this species of ecclesiastical decoration must have been either mad or in "the horrors."

Elaborate decoration was her keynote and she kept well in tune.

At Covent Garden, where it was billed 'not acted 10 years', and produced as a first piece at considerable expense with magnificent decorations, Cushing played Harlequin; Dunstall, Scaramouch; Sparks, Baliardo; Ryan, Charmante; Delane, Cinthio; Peg Woffington, Bellemante; and the Bellamy, Elaria.

In the later wars of Athens the renown of Pericles was still further enhanced; but his chief glory arose from the architectural adornment of the city, and especially from the building of the Parthenon and the splendid decoration of the Acropolis; while his work of judicial reform remains an added monument to his fame, and among the masters of eloquence his orations preserve for him a foremost place.)

The sun streamed in broad flashes of light over the soft rose-tinted walls of the palazzo and over the splendid balcony from which the Doge was wont to view the processions and fêtes of the Republic; the richly sculptured decorations detached themselves at once in allegory, the figures all leading up to Venice enthroned, holding out to the world her proud motto, "Fortis, justa, trono furias, mare sub pede pono."

"The grandeur of their dimensions, the perfection of their workmanship, the richness of their materials, their majesty, beauty, and ideal truth, the splendor of the architecture and pictorial decoration with which they were associated,all conspired to impress the beholder with wonder and awe, and induce a belief of the actual presence of the god.

In a curious picture by Francesco da Cotignola, Mary stands on a sculptured pedestal, in the midst of an architectural decoration of many-coloured marbles, most elaborately painted: through an opening is seen a distant landscape, and the blue sky; on her right stands St. John the Baptist, pointing upwards; on her left St. Francis, adoring; the votary kneels in front.

I do not know what there is about a zebra unless it is the wail paper effects of his exterior decoration that should make a man leave all the other animals and cleave unto the zebra, but pa has been putting in his leisure time all summer breaking the zebras to harness, and driving them single and double in the ring Sundays.

The seven little Breezes would be admitted to the ranks if their mother could find suitable decoration for them.

Mustapha Pasha told her that she should go to Constantinople some day and sing to the Sultan, who would give her a pretty decoration in diamonds; and she laughed carelessly and answered that it might be very amusing.

Along the sides of the chapel are the lofty stalls of the Knights of the Bath, richly carved of oak, tho with the grotesque decorations of Gothic architecture.

They signally contrast the vivid and splendid colouring of objects created or developed by human genius and patience, from the exquisite decorations and jewel-like masses of domestic and public architecture to the magnificent flowers and fruit produced, by the labour of countless generations, from originals so dissimilar that only the records of past ages can trace or the searching comparisons of science recognise them.

Its rude end unadorned simplicity suited, the peculiar ideas of the Puritans, who, in their zeal to escape from the elaborate ornaments and pompous ceremonial employed by the Papists, had rushed into the opposite extreme, and desired that both their place of worship, and their mode of performing it, should be divested of every external decoration and every prescribed form.

It has none of the characteristic decorations of either service, if we except the bas-relief on the entrance-front in Charles street, which represents Britannia distributing laurels to her brave sons by land and sea.

" It may be doubted, however, whether the simplicity of Boccacio's narrative has not sometimes suffered by the additional decorations of Dryden.

It sports in the most charming decorations, carves alabaster facings and cornices on the cliffs, wreathes them in delicate lace, covers them with vast canopies of white satin spangled with stars and fringed with silver.

Those who, having come too late, were obliged to stay outside, saw in the distance, through the three open doors, a scene of which the tawdry decorations of our modern operas can give but a faint idea.

Gradually harden off, and plant out the last week in May or early in June, or shift into larger pots for conservatory decoration.

And the learned Faber remarks, that "allegory and personification were peculiarly agreeable to the genius of antiquity, and the simplicity of truth was continually sacrificed at the shrine of poetical decoration.

The gaudy decorations and the morbid sentiments remind one of flowers strewed over the face of death!