Delights and Vistas
everybody's Christmas spirit. Of course Victorian Vista, handsomely produced and illustrated, is meant to be more than fleeting enter- tainment. Mr. Laver presents his subject on a scale which would seem laborious were it not for his own zest and sense of style. `It is the trifles that count,' he writes, and he has swept up a vast collection of trifles, many of them amusing, many horrifying and some strangely touching. As to whether it is consistently 'the age in its true colours' there may be argument. Should we, I wonder, wish our own age to be judged eventually by the same sort of anthology? The future student of taste and fashion will have, with Noel Carrington's Colour and Pattern in the Home, an idea of how some of us succeeded in living while the rest of us pondered the matter. He will not find it easy to derive a convention from this fascinating and practical volume, for Mr. Carrington, who has previously dealt with Design and Decoration in the Home, is all for individuality. It is for the home-maker to surround himself with something that suits his own personality. This might be dangerous advice, but the book is so civilised that it makes it seem worth trying. The trouble is that so few of us will ever have the resources for a second chance. The -lithographs by Roland Collins deserve a special mention.
The Redoute Roses, presented in a more sumptuous republication to the American President by the Queen-Mother, must have been marked by many already as a perfect Christmas purchase. The tSventy-four large plates offered in the Ariel Press edition have been selected from the many folios of Redoute's matchless colour engrav- ings. Art of this kind, for one reason and another, must be regarded as extinct. The roses are, in a sense, extinct also. They have been succeeded by their cultivated descendants
FRANCIS WATSON
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