[Illustration:  Settle of Carved Oak.  Probably made in Yorkshire.  Period:  Charles II.]

Within the past year, owing to the extensions of the Great Eastern Railway premises at Bishopsgate Street, an old house of antiquarian interest was pulled down, and generously presented by the Company to the South Kensington Museum.  It will shortly be arranged so as to enable the visitor to see a good example of the exterior as well as some of the interior woodwork of a quaint house of the middle of the seventeenth century.  This was the residence of Sir Paul Pindar, diplomatist, during the time of Charles I., and it contained a carved oak chimney-piece, with some other good ornamental woodwork of this period.  The quaint and richly-carved chimney-piece, which was dated 1600, and other decorative work, was removed early in the present century, when the possessors of that time were making “improvements.”

[Illustration:  Staircase in General Ireton’s House, Dated 1630.]

[Illustration:  Pattern of a Chinese Lac Screen. (In the South Kensington Museum.)]

In the illustration of a child’s chair, which is said to have been actually used by Cromwell, can be seen an example of carved oak of this time; it was lent to the writer by its present owner, in whose family it was an heirloom since one of his ancestors married the Protector’s daughter.  The ornament has no particular style, and it may be taken for granted that the period of the Commonwealth was not marked by any progress in decorative art.  The above illustration, however, proves that there were exceptions to the prevalent Puritan objection to figure ornament.  In one of Mrs. S.C.  Hall’s papers, “Pilgrimages to English Shrines,” contributed in 1849 to “The Art Journal,” she describes the interior of the house which was built for Bridget, the Protector’s daughter, who married General Ireton.  The handsome oak staircase had the newels surmounted by carved figures, representing different grades of men in the General’s army—­a captain, common soldier, piper, drummer, etc, etc., while the spaces between the balustrades were filled in with devices emblematical of warfare, the ceiling being decorated in the fashion of the period.  At the time Mrs. Hall wrote, the house bore Cromwell’s name and the date 1630.

We may date from the Commonwealth the more general use of chairs; people sat as they chose, and no longer regarded the chair as the lord’s place.  A style of chair, which we still recognise as Cromwellian, was also largely imported from Holland about this time—­plain square backs and seats covered with brown leather, studded with brass nails.  The legs, which are now generally turned with a spiral twist, were in Cromwell’s time plain and simple.