FREE online courses on Table Etiquette - Flowers For The Breakfast Table

 

We like to have our breakfast-tables bright and attractive, glittering with silver or plated ware, and snowy white with napery; and we must have some flowers or leaves, if only a small spray, a bit of ivy, holly, or evergreen, for it will serve as an appetizer.

 

A cluster of fragrant roses, a bunch of lillies, etc., greatly enhances our breakfast comfort; and we think if wives would but try the influence of them, they would not so often have reason to complain of the crustiness of their husbands and sons.

 

Alas! words fail to portray him. The genial Essayist, Leigh Hunt, says: -- "Set flowers on your table, a whole nosegay if you can get it, or but two or three, or a single flower, a rose, a pink, a daisy.

 

"Bring a few daisies or roses from your last field work, and keep them alive in a little water; preserve but a bunch of clover, or a handful of flowering grass -- one of the most elegant of nature's productions -- and you have something on your table that reminds you of God's creation, and gives you a link with the poets that have done it most honor.

 

"Put a rose, or a lily, or a violet upon your table, and you and Lord Bacon have a custom in common; for this wise man was in the habit of having the flowers in season set upon his table, we believe, morning, noon, and night, that is to say, at all his meals, seeing that they were growing all day.

 

"Now here is a fashion that will last you forever, if you please, and never change with silks, and velvets, and silver forks, nor be dependent upon the caprice of some fine gentleman or lady who have nothing but caprices and changes to give them importance and a sensation.

 

"Flowers on the morning table are especially suitable. They look like the happy wakening of the creation; they bring the perfume of the breath of nature into your room; they seem the very representative and embodiment of the very smile of your home, the graces of good-morrow; proofs that some intellectual beauties are in ourselves, or those about us; some Aurora (if we are so lucky as to have such a companion) helping to strew our life with sweetness, or in ourselves some masculine qualities not unworthy of possess such a companion not unlikely to gain her."