A dinner-table is intended chiefly for the enjoyment of those who sit at it, 
and should never be made an occasion for ostentatious display of plate or 
cumbrous ornaments. One of the charms of a good dinner is agreeable 
conversation; we cannot enjoy a meal that is eaten in dead silence. Now, 
the more heavily weighted the table is with plate or with massive ornaments, 
the more are the guests oppressed by grandeur and awed into silence. For 
every necessary purpose of the feast there can be nothing too good. The 
precious metals are better than crockery for the reception of the viands, and 
china is better than pewter or wood. But there is a point at which to cease 
in the employment of costly furniture, and we certainly reach it when we 
begin to enrich the scene with fruits and flowers. These claim admiration on 
their own account, and require only to be placed in elegant receptacles in an 
elegant manner, so as to be seen from all points, and to offer no obstruction 
to the interchange of words and glances across the table, and so as not to 
overweigh or oppress the social light that belongs to the scene, and which is 
so easily crushed by excess of grandeur, or much more display of any kind 
than is appropriate to the place and the persons assembled. At a grand 
dinner we expect to see grand decorations, such as at an humbler table would 
be extravagant or perhaps absurd ; but the comfort of the guests is the 
matter of primary importance, and the embellishments of the table are to be 
adapted to that end; the guests are not to be adapted to the decorations. 
When two friends happen to be placed on opposite sides of a table, with a 
large urn stuffed full of artificial flowers in the form of a gigantic cauliflower, 
and they have painfully to bob their heads right and left to catch the merest 
glimpses of the extreme outside edges of each other’s physiognomies, they are 
apt to decry the gay cauliflower and its sumptuous receptacle, instead of giving 
God thanks for their happy meeting and their well-spread table; or 
will certainly entertain undesirable notions as to the ideas of their 
host in matters of taste and propriety. The chief adornments of a dinner-table 
are the guests assembled. Let that be remembered for ever and ever. The 
wealth of Croesus might as well be flung into the sea for the distraction of the 
fishes as be employed in overloading the table whereat his guests have 
assembled, not so much to be convinced of his wealth and grandeur as to see 
each other, and to do justice to his hospitality by enjoying it. For the 
present, this perhaps will be enough on the general.requirements of dinner- 
table decorations. 
In furnishing vases, plateaux, and other contrivances, a certain richness of 
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Dinner-Table Decorations. 
