A very early box exhibiting tilting knights, carved in small oblong compartments, has, I am informed, been recently discovered in the outhouse of an old garden. This relic is said to date from the end of the thirteenth century.

To return to the Gothic styles. In chests the earliest carved decoration is almost invariably incised, the tracery very rarely being in relief. This, however, was not the case with other articles of furniture, for we find that the earliest chairs and tables that we possess are elaborately carved with mouldings and tracery in relief. There seems to have been a strange recurrent fashion or predilection for Scandinavian designs, for we find English coffers of the thirteenth century decorated with curious whorls or roundels filled with geometrical patterns in the Scandinavian style; and this taste cropped up again both in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is strange that this liking for Northern design should have manifested itself at various times after the lapse of equal periods of 200 years. The geometrical patterns in these three several periods are identical, and it is only by a study of the construction of the article which they decorate that their proper dates can be ascertained.

One of the great beauties of the Gothic, or Pointed, 2 styles is that two pieces were very seldom made alike. Each reproduction was a separate work, like a masterpiece of architecture or painting, exhibiting the producer's individuality, and was very rarely repeated without some appreciable variation. In later periods - the Jacobean, for instance, furniture of a set type was turned out by the hundred, though not so plentifully as would be the case nowadays. But with the earlier styles each piece was more or less unique. An instance can be found, however, in which three Gothic chests of late fourteenth-century workmanship, and of the very finest character, are identical in their design and treatment. These are to be seen at Faversham, Rainham, and St. John's Hospital, Canterbury, and are no doubt the work of some Kentish cofferer or cabinet-maker of the period. I could instance many other examples in which the designs have a great similarity, but it is seldom indeed that a case of such close identity can be discovered as that observable in these three Kentish chests.

Many of the early Gothic chests and armories were destitute of carving, but were nevertheless decorated with a profusion of scroll work in iron, which served the double purpose of strengthening and beautifying the object to which it was applied. A chest in the Victoria and Albert Museum is a fine example of this type, and a very similar specimen in much better preservation - indeed, remaining in a most perfect state - is in the Hotel Carnavalet in Paris.

Although in such a treatise as this one cannot enter into a long description of the three periods of English Gothic, some acquaintance with the principles of the Gothic Pointed styles of architecture is absolutely necessary for the student before he can even conjecture the date of any piece of furniture made before the classic revival. The three principles which are best and most easily learned are: the lancet-shaped windows of the thirteenth century, or Early English style; the flowing geometrical tracery of the fourteenth century, or Decorated period; and the vertical tracery of the fifteenth century, or Perpendicular style. This is but a mere skeleton guide, for a multitude of other characteristics require to be filled in, and it must always be remembered that, whereas the decoration of the sumptuous and magnificent furniture of the upper classes followed closely the developments of the architectural style in vogue, the rougher productions of the more humble class clung to the old traditions of the previous style. The craftsman of repute, the best of his class in the early days, would probably be employed by rich customers to produce the finest specimen of his art that money could obtain.

Though we have no knowledge of the names of any of these craftsmen, there is no doubt that in their own times they individually possessed a wide reputation. On the other hand, the expense of employing them would be proportionate, and beyond the means of the yeoman or farmer who merely required a hutch for his victuals. These worthies would be satisfied with the work of the local carpenter, who was probably a good deal behind the times, both in the matter of decorative design and in its execution.

FOURTEENTH-CENTURY COFFER IN FAVERSHAM CHURCH, KENT. One of the earliest buttressed coffers remaining in England.

In the first two styles of Gothic architecture we possess scarcely any specimens at all of domestic art, a few examples of chairs or benches which will be duly noticed in their proper chapter being only fragments of ecclesiastical fittings. These examples are so excessively scarce that it rarely falls to the collector's lot to acquire a specimen. Indeed, Gothic furniture is now so scarce in England that it seldom comes into the market. This is sometimes the connoisseur's chance, for dealers have hardly yet learned to appreciate such rarities properly, while the number of collectors who possess expert knowledge and appreciation of Gothic furniture may perhaps be counted on the fingers of the two hands. This may be attributed in some measure to the remoteness of the possibility of acquiring it.

Early furniture in England was constructed in a very solid and weighty fashion, as we know from the numerous coffers which abound in churches throughout the kingdom. We believe, from what we know of French furniture of the thirteenth century, that it followed on almost identical lines to similar pieces made in England. A century or so later, however, marked differences manifested themselves in the respective national methods of construction, the English developing a purely original form of decoration, and still adhering to their old heavy material and joinery, while the French and Flemish, whose elaborate flamboyant was in great measure only a reflex of the Decorated style of England, improved their methods of construction so vastly that the whole character of their furniture acquired a lightness we seldom find in English work of the period. The few examples of furniture for domestic use which remain to us of English work of the fifteenth century depend mainly for beauty upon the charming effect of their structural lines and the simplicity of their workmanship, rather than upon any surface decoration in the shape of carving.