Of this period of our furniture, as of everything else in which good taste is a factor, perhaps the least that is said the better. It is a style, or the absence of one, which has no admirers, and of which neither collectors nor furnishers of taste care to have representative specimens.

It is the time of the worst rococo and baroque treatment of wood made into furniture, and may be said to have come as a reaction from the Empire style, after the monarchy was re-established in France, and adopted by our English makers with "bad translations."

There was also some attempt at a revival of the Gothic taste about this time, and the Mansion House in the City, which was refurnished somewhere about 1840, contains some gilt furniture which makes this apparent.

Taste in England was at such a low ebb about this time that a Royal Commission was appointed by Government in 1841 to report upon the best way to promote the Fine Arts in this country.

In 1851, after some two years of preparation, in which the Prince Consort took a very important part, and the greatest personal interest, there came the great International Exhibition, the turning point of taste in England.

In my "History of Furniture" I have given a representative illustration of the contributory exhibit maple by every manufacturing country of any importance to this "Great World's Show," and those who are interested in taking note of the phases of change through which the design of English and Continental furniture have passed since about 1820 are referred to the notes and illustrations there given. I do not propose to go over the ground again here, except to say that for a time we seemed to have lost the excellent school of the Adams and of the late eighteenth-century manufacturers described in the previous chapter, and to have wandered about seeking fresh ideas.

Not only did the year 1851 give us the great International Exhibition, but it also gave us the beginning of another great and more permanent institution, which has had and is still having a very valuable educational effect upon both the producer and the purchaser of furniture; I mean the South Kensington Museum, the title of which has lately been changed to that of Victoria and Albert Then, in 1862, there was another International Exhibition, followed by one in Paris five years later, and with these and other influences at work the education of designer, manufacturer, and of the customer or purchaser grew apace, and from about 1851 there has been a constant advance in taste and knowledge of all art matters in England.

For those of us who are still too young to remember, or for those with long experience, but short memories, it may be as well to recall some of the features of the furniture in England of fifty years ago.

Something has already been said in the first: part of this chapter of the sideboard so fashionable in 1803. As the century advanced, so did the character of this important article of household equipment, alter from what was really a side table to a massive and elaborate piece of furniture capable of being made the piece de resistance of a large room.

Soon after the side-table period, our grandfathers used what was called the pedestal sideboard, or two pedestals connected by a table. Then later, as large sheets of plate glass were able to be produced for the first time in history, it became the fashion to have these large reflecting mirrors fitted into the backs of the sideboards as well as over the chimney-pieces and between the windows, and the sideboard became elaborately carved with trophies of dead game in the panels of the doors, and massive scrolls ornamented the frame at the back.

A kind of furniture consisting of light articles - work tables, screens, fancy chairs, and lamp stands - was made in papier mache, a material manufactured from paper pressed by machinery, then japanned and enriched with mother-of-pearl inlay. The cheffoniere, too, was of this time, a piece of furniture which has now almost disappeared from our vocabulary. It was a cupboard as to its lower part enclosed by two doors, and had an upper part arranged with shelves for the display of ornaments. Specimens of the genus are still to be seen in second-rate seaside furnished apartments.

But although the period of the first half of the nineteenth century was bad for taste and for art, there was undoubtedly produced by many of our best firms excellent, durable, sound, well-made mahogany furniture.

The modern craze for furniture of an earlier time seems to have banished much of this old-fashioned, comfortable furniture, and it is now chiefly in the older club houses, or in the residences of persons ultra conservative as to furnishings, that one still finds the roomy, low-seated mahogany chair, the substantial table and the plain, heavy book-case of this period.

A favourite form of ornamentation of the chairs was to turn the frames either spirally, or in such a way as to make them resemble a number of balls strung together. These latter have been known as "ball-frame" chairs, and they were generally made in solid rosewood, and the seats covered with needlework in beads or worsted, which our industrious great aunts preferred to lawn tennis and croquet, for the employment of their leisure.

The supports of tables were generally formed by a rather massive straight pillar, from which would radiate at the bottom, three or four scrolls each ending in an animal's foot, and the "Loo" table of this description is still occasionally to be seen in an old fashioned house, having been like other substantial furniture of this period, preserved, while more graceful, but less substantial, articles have perished.

The pole screen having a scroll frame with a picture in worsted or wool, of a couple of King Charles spaniels, was also a prominent feature in the room of a lady of the first half of the nineteenth century.