MRS LANGTRY'S LONDON HOME.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3159, 13 August 1881, Page 3

MRS LANGTRY'S LONDON HOME.

The household effects of the beautiful Mrs Langtiy were sold at auction recently, and a large crowd of London people attended the sale. There were Elizabethan chairs and Chippendale tables and pretty screens, to say nothing of ca3t off pair 3of skates, yacht flags, and dog chains, all to bo put under the auctioneer's hammer, and the people who had a desire to know how a professional beauty live:! gratified their curiosity and indulged in a souvenir one and the same time. The matter is of no moment, however, but for one fact, and that is, that the house, which was a famous fashionable resort, where the best people of London were being constantly entertained, was a poor one, shorn of its decorations and robbed of the taste which changed its low, square rooms and narrow halls into a bower of beauty. It was in a fashionable neighborhood, but it was of itself a thoroughly unfashionable house, old and common, with tawdry, cheap interior decorations and common appearance. The taste of the woman whose dresses were the despair of dowagers with marriageable daughters, and whose beauty was enhanced by the fautless costumes she wore, made this house a home of beauty. The woman who could make the matamorphose that was made in that house should not be permitted to remain in idleness. If fortune fails her, and it is whispered that it is already doing so, she should be induced to teach aesthetic art to common minds and show the unimaginative of her sex how to cover dingy walls and tawdry ceilings with green draperies, and convret cheap windows into bowers for flowers. Her value would be priceless if she could be induced to do this, for the art she possesses is one of the very rarest, and women who have it are worth more to the world than they know. If Mrs Langtry would but return to London she wouldfind her popularity increased tenfold, for it is with admiration that people speak of her, after knowing her cleverness in house furnishing. With a few handsome rutjs and easy chairs, plenty of draperies and not many articles of virtu, she transformed an old London house into a charming home, where guests were sure to enjoy their surroundings and ifc3 restful beauty. Mrs Langtry is, therefore, something more than a professional beauty, and if she is to go out West, as the papers announce, what a godsend she would be to the kind of folk described m the ' Fair Barbarian,' who live at 'Bloody Gulches,' and send to New York for furniture to crowd into them. The upholsterers might suffer in purse, but the cause of all would bo served and people would be all the happier for having tasteful homes. Mrs Langtry has a call before her if she wishes to come before the people as a teacher of Octavia Bassetts, and no doubt some enterprising lectures bureau will have her booked for lectures immediately. —Brooklyn Eagle,