Let us begin with carving. Sculpture is the highest or most beautiful kind of decoration that can be applied to furniture. It can only be executed by a trained artist. To go no farther back here than the Italian and French Renaissance furniture, generally made of walnut-wood, it is the spirited and graceful sculpture that makes its _first_ great attraction. The Italian carving of this kind is the most graceful; while that of France by Bachelier and others, and much that was executed in England and Germany, being, if less graceful, always spirited and thoroughly decorative. As a general rule, sculpture so applied is _conventional_ in design and treatment, that is, we rarely see it, (except, perhaps, occasionally in little ivory statuettes, and in bas-reliefs,) strictly imitative of nature, like perfect Greek sculpture. But neither should we find strict studies from nature on Greek furniture, if we had it, except with the same limitations. The furniture made by Greco-Roman artists, and discovered at Pompeii,[6] bears witness to this assertion, such as a head, a bust, the claws of animals, sculptured on furniture generally ending in scrolls or leafwork. If a human figure is complete, it bears no real proportion to objects round it, and so on. [6] See also Q. de Quincy, Le Jupiter Olympien. Excellent wood sculpture used to be executed in England, from the days of Grinling Gibbon to those of Adam and the Chippendales, suited to the furniture then in fashion. I wish I could say that our furniture makers of to-day could easily, or did generally, command such talents. Ingeniously carved representations of animals and game on sideboards we sometimes see, but game 'dead' in every sense. If, indeed, Messrs. Crace, Howard, Jackson and Graham, and other firms could persuade the Royal Academicians to model for them, those artists would have to give some material amount of time to the study of how they could so effectually modify their skill as to suit the requirements and opportunities of a piece of furniture, these being quite peculiar. The French are easily our masters in this respect, but even they sacrifice good qualities proper to this kind of sculpture, in a morbid search after the softness of nature.