Chippendale the elder was a cabinet-maker who flourished about the middle of the last century, long after Anne's reign. He was no creator, like Boule, but he was a capital workman. His joiner's work was excellent, his use of glue and veneer properly small. He was the author of many of the most elaborate Louis XV. patterns in England: frames, tables, commodes, pedestals, all of them ingenious, all of them adapted from the French, and contradicting all sense of purpose in frames, tables, commodes and pedestals: not a straight line anywhere, not a moment's rest for the eye, all wriggling curves like bewitched vegetation, giving birth in unexpected places to human heads, beasts and birds. Nothing so like a bad dream ever caught the fretful and sickly popular fancy. His books of designs were published between 1752 and 1762.

He also adapted his workshop to the prevailing taste when it turned pseudo-Greek, Dutch, and pseudo-Chinese, and manufactured many good, and as many base and bad, articles of furniture. His meretricious simulations of bronze stands, (in wood, the impossible curves strengthened by internal wires,) were turned out among his bureaux and chairs, really well and durably constructed, with mere servility to the customer's purse, not with any artistic independence of principle. Chippendale was a clever tradesman; he is overrated by blind enthusiasts till one almost fancies he was a shopkeeping divinity. We hear twice as much of him as we do of Gibbons, who was an artist, not a carpenter. But he would have been thought nothing of in a country of real artistic discrimination like France and Italy.

Furniture and dress naturally echo each other in fashion. And we cannot too firmly assert (for the benefit of accurate minds) that as the Renascence waned, the new fashions in England aimed at novelty and surprise as did contemporary modes in France, without the inspiration which centred in the reign of Louis XIV., or the skill and fancy which ran riot under Louis XV. Those new fashions which were not again directly classic, were striking, 'loud,' even garish. When the leather hangings were torn and tarnished, they came to be replaced by papers of stronger and stronger patterns, with no great improvement in quality. In many old Georgian houses we can study the flaunting peacocks and impossible flowers which disported themselves alike on walls and hoop-wide sacques. There is an interesting specimen of this wall-paper at Ashley Park, against which the dim. faded old Georgian mar-queterie disappears. For the birds and scrolls on the marqueterie are small and by comparison quiet in tint. Those on the walls are life size - poorly coloured, ill drawn, garish and vulgar, but 'Queen Anne.'