WE have now arrived at a period which it has become the fashion to designate as that of Chippendale. Thereby, as is usually the result of exalting one name at the expense of others, some injustice has been done. A writer is anxious to offer strong reasons for his advocacy of the claims of his subject to pre-eminence. He has a tendency, in the result, to blind himself to his paragon's defects, and to deny to others what merits they possess. Ruskin, engrossed in Turner, condemned another genius, Constable. This has to a large extent been the attitude of historians of furniture as regards Chippendale. A man of whose life we know extremely little, but who in his books has left incontrovertible evidence that along with taste which was great, but by no means infallible, he possessed the soul of a tradesman, has been elevated to a pinnacle of honour which he scarcely deserves. One might suppose that from his single brain sprang suddenly and without warning the style called after him. Never could there be a greater mistake than to suppose any such thing. Chippendale has no more claim to be the inventor of a new general shape of furniture than he has to the origination of the cabriole leg.

He is but one link in the chain of those who produced the gradual evolution of shapes of eighteenth-century English furniture; and though he is one of the strongest links, his merits are not so overshadowing as to warrant our setting him unduly above contemporary and succeeding cabinetmakers and designers. If they erred in the way of extravagance, making monstrosities in the fashions of Chinese, French rococo, and Gothic, so to the full did he. It would, I think, be a fairer, though less picturesque appellation, if we called the period which we have arrived at that of mahogany, not of Chippendale. Then no injustice will be done to deserving designers; the period will be enlarged so as to include all those developments which were due to the introduction, about 1720, of that strong and fine-grained wood, and we shall be saved from the anomaly of calling after Chippendale a period in which, though he flourished, he was not in the least way celebrated. This will not preclude our doing justice to his merits, and appreciating the manner in which, taking barer forms as he found them, he improved and decked them out with ornamental details. These, while adding to the beauty, did not detract from the strength and usefulness of the general shape of a former generation.

We have come to an age of activity in publishing books of furniture designs. If Chippendale had been first in the field to publish his book he would have a stronger claim to give his name to an epoch. Mrs. K. Warren Clouston, however, in her excellent book on The Chippendale Period in English Furniture, p. 69, thinks it probable that he was forestalled by the Society of Upholsterers and Cabinetmakers, which brought out One Hundred New and Genteel Designs, being all the most approved Patterns of Household Furniture in the present Taste. The volume is unfortunately undated, and its priority to Chippendale must be concluded from intrinsic evidence. It contains designs for writing-tables, bureau bookcases, chairs, and other objects of furniture, some in the French, others in the Gothic style, which, if executed and still existing, would certainly be classed by their owners as 'Chippendale.'