It is true that the wars of the Roses, more bloody and ruinous than any experienced in this country, delayed that growth of domestic luxury which might have been expected from the then wealth of England. But when Henry the seventh established a settled government, and from his time downwards, the decorations and the accumulation of furniture in houses, libraries, and collections of works of art rapidly increased. Many of the books in the "King's library," and many pictures and movables still in possession of the crown, may be traced to that day. It is difficult, indeed, to imagine the England which Leland saw in his travels. It must have been full of splendid objects, and during the reign of Henry the feudal mansions, as well as the numerous royal palaces of Windsor, Richmond, Havering, and others, were filled with magnificent furniture. Mabuse and Torrigiano were employed by the king, and this example found many imitations; artists, both foreign and English, made secular furniture, as rich and beautiful as that of the churches and religious houses which covered the country. Taste in furniture, as in architecture, both in continental Europe and in these islands had nevertheless passed the fine period of mediæval design. The "Gothic" or pointed forms and details had become uninventive and commonplace. The whole system awaited a change. The figure sculpture, however, of the latter years of this century, though life-sized statues had lost much of the dignity and simplicity of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was approaching the realization of natural form, which it attained in such excellence in the succeeding century. The ingenuity and raciness of the smaller figure carving both in stall-work of churches and on the tops and fronts of boxes and caskets, in panel-work of cabinets or doors, &c., during the last half of the fifteenth century are scarcely surpassed by the more academic and classical figure design of the sixteenth. Carvers on all kinds of wood furniture and decoration of houses delighted in doubling their figures up into quaint and ingenious attitudes, and if the architecture was latterly tame, though showy and costly, imagery continued to be full of individuality and inventiveness. CHAPTER VII. THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY.