One more anecdote of real life can be mentioned in which the great musician figures in company with a joint-stool. In Aylesbury Street, Clerkenwell, there lived in the reign of Queen Anne a worthy of the name of Thomas Britton, who, though but an itinerant small-coal vendor, became famous as being the first person to introduce the entertainment known as a concert into this country. His musical ability, and the success of the novelty which he presented, attracted towards him all the great musicians of the day. Amongst those who performed at his 'musical club' were Bannister, Dr. Pepusch, and the giant Handel himself. The celebrated violinist Dubourg also made his first appearance at one of these concerts, and, being at that time a mere child, was elevated, for the purpose of performing his solo, upon a joint-stool. We are informed by a contemporary that the juvenile debutant was so overcome by the splendour of the fashionable audience before whom he stood that he lost his balance and was nearly precipitated from his impromptu pedestal to the ground.

* 'The church, although rebuilt about the year 1715, was not opened for divine service until the 29th August, 1720. .. It is known that this piece was performed at Canons in the year 1720.' - 'Beauties of England and Wales,' 1816.

The stool, though formerly in the organ-loft, has recently been moved into the adjoining vicarage.

The low Jacobean domestic stool, with stuffed or covered seat, such as we see at Knole and other great mansions, is a rarer article than the joint-stool, while foot-stools of any considerable age are excessively scarce. Most of the pieces passed off as such are merely abbreviated joint-stools which some accident, in the first instance, has shorn of their height. These can usually be detected by the falseness of their proportions, for the 'cut-down' article is an obvious eye-sore to the experienced collector and man of taste.

Henry Shaw, in his book on 'Ancient Furniture,' gives two interesting plates of chairs of the time of Charles II., one of them in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and said to have been actually given by that monarch to Elias Ashmole. The other chair, which is of a very similar character, was formerly in the collection of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill. Other examples of this type may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. These chairs have very low backs which, instead of being padded, are fitted with small turned rails, repeating the form of the legs. The material used in most cases is ebony, ornamented in almost every available part with a profusion of carving. At first sight they have a somewhat Oriental appearance, due to the lack of leading lines in their surface carving; but on analyzing the latter, we find that it is merely a repetition of the meaningless scrolls, curves, and strewed flowers characteristic of late seventeenth-century work, though made somewhat under the influence of the East Indies. I have mentioned these chairs, although constructed of a material outside the scope of our subject, as they serve to emphasize the fact that this particular type of art seems to have been restricted to ebony.

They are, however, specimens of some of the more elaborate furniture in vogue in the reign of Charles II.

In the reign of William III. the fashion arose of having two intersecting curved rails underneath the seat and but slightly distant from the floor, connecting the legs without adding any strength to the structure. A turned knob representing an inverted pendant was usually placed at the point of intersection of these rails. The backs of chairs were extremely high and con-structionally weak, and generally had a laced panel, supported on either side by a pillar of nondescript design. A suite of furniture of this decadent type exists at Penshurst Place. In some much plainer examples the backs were merely shaped and padded, while in chairs that were composed solely of wood the back panel possessed the raised centre plane described in Chapter IV (The Renaissance - And After) (The Renaissance - And After).

Now, if the student of antique furniture will examine the chair in Westminster Abbey, which was made as a companion to the Edwardian state chair on the occasion of the double coronation of William III. and Mary, he will find a curious indication of the insistence of Metropolitan fashion. In the reproduction, although the lines of the older Gothic model are fairly well adhered to, the beautiful pointed arcade under the arms is entirely missing, being superseded by the raised centre panel, which also appears on the back. Queen Mary's coronation chair, in fact, has a Gothic outline with late classic details, proving that it was probably as difficult for the Court craftsman in furniture of the seventeenth century to reproduce the purity of an earlier pattern as it was for Sir Christopher Wren to complete the western towers of the Abbey without reverting to the fashionable revival in vogue in his day.

This aspect is strikingly opposed to the condition of country industries, which experienced considerable difficulty in breaking free from old traditions. In the modern Town Hall at Dorchester (by no means the sort of place in which one would expect to find such a relic) is an old arm-chair said to be indubitably that used by Judge Jeffreys in the 'Bloody Assize' at that town, when he passed sentence of death on nearly 300 prisoners. This chair has the raised centre plane in its back panel, surmounted by a characteristic piece of late seventeenth-century carving, but a critical connoisseur would hardly take the cabriole legs which support it in front as being of the date of James II. Another chair of the low leather-backed type which has associations with Jeffreys' visit to Taunton is fully described in the chapter on 'Vicissitudes of Old Furniture.'

One variety of the high-backed padded chairs of this period has stuffed flanges, or half sides, from which the arms project - a sort of compromise between the ordinary chair and the grandfather chair of the next epoch. Some very fine specimens of this description may be seen in the collection in the Brown Gallery at Knole House, that wonderful repository of seventeenth-century furniture. But we are now rather getting beyond the oak period as far as regards chairs, in the construction of which walnut and lacquered white woods began to be extensively employed, oak going out of vogue in the towns where fashion dwelt, though the use of the latter material still lingered in country districts.