WITH the Restoration we arrive at a turning point in the history of English furniture. The amateur of English oak chests and cabinets and tables cannot but have felt that until now the objects of his love have, except in a few exceptional cases, been at a disadvantage when compared with their analogues in foreign countries. He may have consoled himself with the reflection that, unobtrusive and unambitious as it is, the woodwork of the English joiner has hitherto been the natural outcome of our poorer and less polished society; but he must have harboured an occasional wish that he could find an English chest which would hold its own against an Italian cassone, or a cabinet worthy of comparison with those of the school of Toulouse. With the exception of one or two specimens at Hardwick, and a few perhaps elsewhere, there is nothing in the history of English furniture up to the end of the seventeenth century which for completeness of design and finish can be mentioned in the same breath with the masterpieces of the Continent. Even as from the introduction of oil painting into England - whatever the precise date may be - our monarchs relied upon foreign artists to depict themselves and the beauties of their courts, and no English painter of genius was for many generations to arise, so for the ornament of our furniture we have been largely indebted to foreign influence, and no English cabinetmaker has left a name.

It has been, on one side, a monotonous story of naive adoption of such continental graces as our generally awkward hands could copy; on the other, a certain insular prejudice has preserved us from complete subservience to our model: and the result has been a compromise which shows itself in the insufficient design, but honest workmanship, of our cabinets and tables and chairs. Useful, strong, enduring, unassuming - above all, not vulgar or pretentious, are the epithets which most naturally suggest themselves when we review the furniture of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period. Sumptuousness and magnificence were not to be found readily in a country which had been so unsettled until the reign of Henry VII.; and, with few exceptions, the furniture which remains to us of all the periods which we have had under review, must be taken as characteristic of a country that was behind its rivals in the elegances of civilisation. Yet with all the want of finesse and invention betrayed by the English carver and joiner, there has been hitherto a stamp of national character about his work which is undeniable, however he may have lumbered after foreign design.

Now begins, after a period of civil wars and national impoverishment, a period when, if there was not more money in the country, at any rate much money was again spent at court, and foreign fashions were imported wholesale. The change is in nothing more apparent than in the extraordinary difference between the old oak chair and that known as of the style of Charles II. It seems at first one of radical alteration, but, as was hinted in the previous chapter on chairs, it was not so sudden as it might appear. If we bear in mind the armless, half solid-backed chairs made in Lancashire and Derbyshire (Plates lviii., lix.), we shall be prepared for a class of chair which is associated with the name of Cromwell, and the idea of which (or probably the thing itself) was imported from Holland. It is simply-necessary to imagine the upper part of a half solid-backed Lancashire chair upholstered with leather, and its seat also covered with the same material, which is fastened with round-headed brass nails, to have an idea of the ' Cromwellian' chair before one. It may be seen, over and over again, depicted with the utmost fidelity in the pictures of the little Dutch masters.

The legs are of the usual turned description, with rectangular parts where the cross rails fit into them.