Wedgwood, Chippendale and many others of their day, true artists in form, wrote their thoughts in wood, stone, and pottery, and bequeathed them to future ages.  Certainly the work of such minds in such company must outlast mere mechanical efforts.  It is interesting to note, that many of the Chippendale chairs keep in their under construction the square and simple forms of a much earlier period, while the upper part, the back, and seats are carved into curves and floriated designs.  One cannot help wondering whether this square solidity was simply a reminiscence or persistence of earlier forms, or a conscious return to the most direct principles of weight-bearing constructions.

All furniture made under primitive conditions naturally depends upon perpendicular and horizontal forms, because uninfluenced construction considers first of all the principle of strength; but under the varied influences of the Georgian period one hardly expects fidelity to first principles.  New England carpenters and cabinet-makers who had wrought under the masters of carpentry and cabinet-work in England brought with them not only skill to fashion, but the very patterns and drawings from which Chippendale and Sheraton furniture had been made in England.  Our English forefathers were very fond of the St. Domingo mahogany, brought back in the ship-bottoms of English traders, but the English workmen who made furniture in the new world, while they adopted this foreign wood, were not slow to appreciate the wild cherry, and the different maples and oak and nut woods which they found in America.  They were woods easy to work, and apt to take on polish and shining surface.  The cabinet-makers liked also the abnormal specimens of maple where the fibre grew in close waves, called curled maple, as well as the great roots flecked and spotted with minute knots, known as dotted maple.

All these things went into colonial furniture, so beautifully cut, so carefully dowelled and put together, so well made, that many of the things have become heirlooms in the families for which they were constructed.  I remember admiring a fine old cherry book-case in Mr. Lowell’s library at Cambridge, and being told by the poet that it had belonged to his grandfather.  When I spoke of the comparative rarity of such possessions he answered:  “Oh, anyone can have his grandfather’s furniture if he will wait a hundred years!”

Nevertheless, with modern methods of manufacture it is by no means certain that a hundred years will secure possession of the furniture we buy to-day to our grandchildren.  In those early days it was not uncommon, it was indeed the custom, for some one of the men who were called “journeymen cabinet-makers”—­that is, men who had served their time and learned their trade, but had not yet settled down to a fixed place and shop of their own—­to take up an abode in the house with the family which had built it, for a year, or even two or three years, carrying on the work in some out-house or dependence, choosing and seasoning the wood, and measuring the furniture for the spaces where it was to stand.