IF Chippendale has been unduly exalted with posthumous honours at the cost of several others, Heppelwhite has obtained bare justice at one other's expense. His name is remembered, and his furniture serves as a model for present cabinetmakers, but his friend and probable collaborator, Thomas Shearer, is almost forgotten. It is, however, difficult to draw any distinction between the styles of the two men. Their designs appear in the same book, and it is a question which deserves the credit for the new shapes introduced by them. To Heppelwhite may perhaps be attributed the shield-back chair, and to Shearer the screen writing-case, which first appears under his name. These two men's work evinces, on the whole, great practical common-sense. Chippendale allowed his fancy to run away with him in many exuberant drawings. Heppelwhite and Shearer wisely left the ultra-fantastic alone. To Chippendale we must ascribe it as a transcendent merit that he relied so much upon the mere carving of one species of wood, restricting himself to its most legitimate use. Against Heppelwhite it may be objected as a defect that he went far in the combination of cabinet-work with painting.

Whatever the feminine charm of this method of decorating furniture, it is a method only to be tolerated when at its best, and that because tradition authorises it. Inlay of woods is a beautiful art which many of the finest pieces of furniture have been able to dispense with. Nevertheless it is so inherently akin to the material and technique of the cabinetmaker, it appealed with such paramount force to the cabinetmakers of the later eighteenth century, and these last produced such exquisite work of this kind, that I leave it to others to find what objections they like. Theoretically, inlaying is perhaps a sign of incipient decadence of an art. To trouble oneself with minute twists and turns of scroll-work in coloured woods may not be worthy of the genius of a Grinling Gibbons or of a Bachelier of Toulouse; but it seems a grace inseparable from the furniture of Heppelwhite and Sheraton, furniture the very best, perhaps, that was ever made to display it. This I say with the work of Riesener and Roentgen and their peers present to my mind. The French were so preoccupied with the claims of ormolu that there is a constant fight between the relative splendours of the sculptor and chaser on the one hand, and of the inlayer on the other.

If one were asked to name the most artistically successful, one would fall back upon Oeben, who often moderated his ormolu in the interests of a quieter style of inlay than was practised later. In the work of Heppelwhite and Sheraton the inlay has a fair field, with none of the 'clinquant' of ormolu to put it in the shade. When it is confined to whatever in conventional ornament the genius of the method will allow, there is every practical reason, at any rate, to admire it. We have no cause to complain if we can find plenty of specimens, probably better in an artistic sense, after one hundred and twenty years, than they were on the day of their making. The closer it attempts the realism of the picture-maker, the less legitimate, and the less satisfactory, does inlay become. We have at the present time, under the auspices of the so-called 'Art nouveau,' modern French instances of landscapes with evening skies and rivers which, it is hoped, a flowing grain will imitate. The eighteenth century inlayers hardly overstepped the limits of their art so ignorantly as this.

Thus they have spared us the ultra-modern absurdity of a landscape with a keyhole in the centre of the sky.