But this does not make it the less an advantage to a tradesman of good capital to keep an abundant and various stock of goods.] [30] [It is really curious to find in this chapter the same contrast drawn between the _old_ and the _new_ style of fitting up shops, and carrying on business, as would be drawn at the present day by nine out of every ten common observers.

The notion that the shops of the past age were plain, while those of the present are gaudy, and that the tradesmen of a past age carried on all their business in a quiet way and with little expense, is as strongly impressed on the minds of the present generation, as it is here seen to have been on those of Defoe's contemporaries, a hundred and twenty years ago, although it is quite impossible that the notion can be just in both cases.

The truth probably is, that in Defoe's time, and at all former times, there were conspicuous, but not very numerous, examples of finely decorated shops, which seemed, and really were, very much of a novelty, as well as a rather striking exception from the style in which such places in general were then, and had for many years been furnished.

So far, however, from these proving, as Defoe anticipates, a warning to future generations, the general appearance of shops has experienced a vast improvement since those days; and the third-rate class are now probably as fine as the first-rate were at no distant period.

At the same time, as in the reign of the first George, we have now also a few shops fitted up in a style of extraordinary and startling elegance, and thus forming that contrast with the general appearance of shops for the last forty years, which makes old people, and many others, talk of all the past as homely and moderate, and all the present as showy and expensive.] [31] [The author seems here to carry his objections to decoration to an extreme.