Читать книгу Chats on Household Curios - Fred. W. Burgess - Страница 5

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The love of the antique is regarded by some as a cultivated taste. The specialization upon any one branch of household curios may justly be regarded as such, but surely not the regard, almost reverence, for family relics, although they are but the common things of everyday life! Their collection stimulates the connoisseur, and encourages him to fresh exertions, and in that sense the habit of keeping a keen look out for anything that may illumine previous researches or add greater lustre to those things already secured, is gradually cultivated.

Household curios are not unassociated with the folklore of the district where such objects have been made, or were commonly in use; and the very names of many things, the uses of which are almost forgotten, are suggestive of former occupations and older methods of practising household economy and the preparation of food. It is common knowledge that the purest old English is met with in the dialects of the countryside, and oftentimes once household words, now lost in modern speech, are found again when the old names or original purposes of the curios remaining to us are discovered. The cultivation of a taste for gathering together household antiques is much to be desired, and in the pursuit of such knowledge there is great pleasure—and as the value of genuine antiques is ever rising, some profit, too.