Art. 7.-OLD ENGLISH FURNITURE.

1. The Dictionary of English Furniture. By Percy Macquoid and Ralph Edwards. Vols. I and II. Country Life,' 1924 and 1925.

2. Early English Furniture and Woodwork. By Herbert Cescinsky and Ernest R. Gribble. Two vols. Routledge, 1922.

3. Old Oak Furniture. By Fred Roe. Methuen, 1905. 4. The Present State of Old English Furniture. By R. W. Symonds. Duckworth, 1921.

5. An Encyclopædia of English Furniture.

Introduction by Oliver Brackett. Benn, 1927.

With an

6. A Glossary of English Furniture of the Historic Periods. By J. Penderel-Brodhurst and Edwin J. Layton. Murray, 1925.

And other works.

THE collection of old furniture and domestic objects of art, as such, is now so widespread as to be actually popular. It is, for the most part, prompted by a purely modern taste; though in this connexion taste is often too dignified a word to use, for craze or fashion is not infrequently the guiding principle behind the impulse to acquire old things,' so that objects æsthetically and intrinsically worthless are apt, nowadays, to command artificial and absurd prices. The Post Office London Directory of sixty years ago shows the names of less than twenty antique dealers as against upwards of five hundred at the present time: since the late Victorian ' renaissance' of the 'eighties (chiefly associated with the name of William Morris), about three times as many books on this subject-exclusive of books about pictures -have been published as have years elapsed, and by far the greater proportion of these have appeared in the present century. Indeed, as time goes on, the literature of the subject threatens to be reproduced to the same extent as the specimens with which it is concerned.

An interest in furniture began with a few connoisseurs and spread to innumerable experts; and now so complacent is the modern collector in the security of the prevalent taste that he is apt to forget that the acquisition of antiques, or specimens that are so called, is not to be

associated only with the period in living memory; any more than is the rascality, its concomitant. The desire to possess objects of art for other than their intrinsic merits is an old one: as old, too, is the forgery of them. Michel Angelo is said to have damaged and then buried one of his own sculptured heads for several months in order that the stained and battered marble might attract a purchaser for whom a brand-new work of art, even by a master who earned some acknowledgment in his own day, would be of secondary importance!

'The Antiquary,' by Shakerley Marmion, which was performed at the Cockpit in 1641, might well, in essentials, have been post-dated three hundred years. The Antiquary's nephew, a young man called Lionell, derides the old man's passion, at the same time as, with an eye to the main chance, he wishes that he could profit by it.

Now I must travel, on a new exploit,

To an old Antiquary, he is my uncle,

And I his heir; would I could raise a fortune

Out of his ruins: he is grown obsolete,

And 'tis time he were out of date; they say he sits
All day in contemplation of a statue

With ne'er a nose; and dotes on the decays

With greater love, than the self-loved Narcissus
Did on his beauty. If I wist he were not precise,
I'd lay to purchase some stale interludes
And give them him: Books that have not attained
To the Platonick yer, but wait their course,

And happy hour, to be reviv'd again:

Then would I induce him to beleeve they were
Some of Terence's hundred and fifty comedies,
That were lost in the Adriatick sea

When he returned from banishment.

Some such

Gullery as this, might be enforced upon him.'

Several skilled craftsmen to-day who know that not even connoisseurs are always precise, and many a clumsy forger, relying on the ignorance of the majority, are more daring than Lionell; while from the human standpoint the modern pawnbroker will, no doubt, be able to vouch for similar conduct, unbecoming in nephews, at the present time.

Antiquity and association have, it seems, shared equally the collector's attention before beauty, and long

before material usefulness. In 1728, Young, in 'The Love of Fame,' exclaimed:

'How his eyes languish! how his thoughts adore

That painted coat, which Joseph never wore !

He shows, on holidays, a sacred pin,

That touched the ruff, that touched queen Bess's chin.'

In the same category of ideas, though not strictly to the point, is the story of the old military college at Cowley, on the occasion of an inspection by a Royal Personage and his lady. The rooms of a certain cadet were set aside as a cloak-room. 'I have taken the liberty, Sir,' said his servant later to the cadet, of bottling some of the water 'er Royal 'ighness washed 'er 'ands in. Tain't often one gets such a chance.' And we remember: 'A clod, a piece of orange peel,

An end of a cigar

Once trod on by a princely heel
How beautiful they are!'

Peter Pindar, too, jeered at the antique collector's enthusiasm:

'Rare are the buttons of a Roman's breeches,

In antiquarian eyes surpassing riches:

Rare is each crack'd, black, rotten, earthen dish
That held of ancient Rome the flesh and fish.'

Johnson in an essay printed in The Idler,' under the title, Virtuosos Whimsical,' gives his benediction to collecting only if it be restrained by prudence and morality,' but it is clear that even in 1760 the passion for collecting had so advanced that he has cause to write of 'capricious emulations,' 'unnatural wants,' and the 'desire of accumulating trifles which distinguishes many by whom no other distinction could have ever been obtained.' He goes on to say:

'He that has lived without knowing to what height desire may be raised by vanity, with what rapture baubles are snatched out of the hands of rival collectors, how the eagerness of one raises eagerness in another, and one worthless purchase makes a second necessary, may, by passing a few hours at an auction, learn more than can be shown by many volumes of maxims and essays. . . . [The collector] when he comes is soon overpowered by his habitual passion; he is

attracted by rarity, seduced by example, and inflamed by competition. . . . The novice is often surprised to see what minute and unimportant discriminations increase or diminish value. . . .'

We know to-day that a single misprint in a particular book will enhance its value from shillings to a corresponding number of guineas; but also we must not forget that the modern carving on a bracket beneath an old oak sideboard has genuinely detracted from its value, because it has spoiled its appearance. Nevertheless, Johnson's continued observations are often as just now as they were when they were written.

'Beauty is far from operating upon collectors as upon low and vulgar minds, even where beauty might be thought the only quality that could deserve notice. . . . China is sometimes purchased for little less than its weight in gold, only because it is old, though neither less brittle, nor better painted, than the modern. . . . Whether this curiosity, so barren of immediate advantage, and so liable to depravation, does more harm or good, is not easily decided. Its harm is apparent at the first view. It fills the mind with trifling ambition; fixes the attention upon things which have seldom any tendency towards virtue or wisdom; employs in idle inquiries the time that is given for better purposes; and often ends in mean and dishonest practices, when desire increases by indulgence beyond the power of honest gratification.'

The mean and dishonest practice we know; but, alas! what was true in comparing old with the modern furniture and china in Johnson's day is seldom true now. In an earlier contribution to 'The Idler,' he writes, as 'Peter Plenty,' of a wife who fills the house with bargains. 'The parlour is decorated with so many piles of china that I dare not step within the, door. . . . A woman in the next alley lives by scouring the brass and pewter, which are only laid up to tarnish again.'

Dickens seems to have regarded his Old Curiosity Shop with a certain implicit distaste, '. . . a receptacle for old and curious things. . . musty treasures.' People who dislike old furniture always call it musty. There were

suits of mail,' he says, 'standing like ghosts in armour ... fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters : rusty weapons of various kinds: distorted figures in china, and wood, and iron, and ivory; tapestry, and

strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams-not, however, may we add with all respect, designed in such evil dreams as some furniture that Dickens must have lived to see in polite drawing-rooms. In the 'eighties 'Punch' made fun of the collecting spirit and showed a young couple in earnest competition to nurse the newly acquired old china teapot: while at the end of the last century-Come,' says Mr Beerbohm's Mr Flimflam, the novelist, you have yet to see my bits of old oak. Yes, oak is quite a hobby with me.'*

From such widely scattered quotations it will be seen that collectors from the 17th century to the present have been similar enough and common enough for other people to ridicule them.

We turn to a more practical consideration of the subject. The catalogue of the Museum Tradescantium' at Lambeth, the core of the Ashmolean Museum, was published by John Tradescant, the younger, in 1656. The elder Tradescant had been James I's head gardener, and the museum was begun with a view to preserving rare botanical specimens. The catalogue, however, shows that at one time or another all sorts of other curiosities, such as we see in private collections or displayed in museums to-day, had been brought together in the first half of the 17th century. There were coins and medals, arms, a suit of Chinese armour, 'divers sorts of ambers with (Flyes) (Spiders),' to say nothing of the knife wherewith Hudson was killed in the NorthWest passage or Hudson's Bay'; while 'The story of the Prodigall Son carved in wood: antient' is just the sort of thing that might have been (and indeed was) picked up' for a couple of shillings at some country sale in the last years of the 19th century.

In the 18th century, while antiquity and association were by no means neglected, collectors such as Walpole probably made beauty their first consideration. However commonplace a weapon, the knife in Tradescant's catalogue certainly was interesting because it had killed Hudson; and so we should perceive it to be now. Modern parallel instances are innumerable. It was in