=The Survival of Oak in the Provinces.=--The foregoing descriptions apply to fashionable folks' furniture. Such fashions did not come into usage in the farmhouses and in the cottages. Oak was still employed without being displaced by the walnut of the town maker. Oak was in the main more suitable for the particular class of furniture which was likely to receive less delicate care than the writing-cabinets and bureaus and the china-cupboards of more fastidious people. Tea-drinking had become the luxury of the great world of society, and had hardly come into general use in the country till late in the reign of Anne, though by 1690 it had gained considerable favour in London. Coffee was introduced slightly earlier, and many invectives in broadsides and in poetical satires appear in the late seventeenth century against coffee and coffee-houses. In 1674 the "Women's Petition against Coffee" complained that "it made men as unfruitful as the deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought; that the offspring of our mighty ancestors would dwindle into a succession of apes and pigmies, and on a domestic message a husband would stop by the way to drink a couple of cups of coffee." The prejudice against coffee, and especially against coffee-houses, was lasting, and coffee failed to establish itself as a national beverage. The labouring classes declined to be weaned from their ale and other stronger drinks. The Spaniards brought chocolate from Mexico; Roger North, Attorney-General to James II., uttered a violent polemic against chocolate houses, perhaps more on account of the political clubs gathered there than against the beverage itself. "The use of coffee-houses," says he, "seems much improved by a new invention called chocolate-houses, for the benefit of rooks and cullies of quality, where gaming is added to the rest, as if the Devil had erected a new university, and those were the colleges of its professors." [Illustration: QUEEN ANNE GLASS- OR CHINA-CUPBOARD. Spun glass doors. Heavy bars mark early type prior to tracery. GEORGIAN CORNER CUPBOARD. LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Broken architraves and cushion top. Having original hinges. (_By the courtesy of Messrs. Phillips, Hitchin._)] [Illustration: SMALL OAK TABLE. 1700-1720. Height, 2 ft. 4-3/4 ins.; width, 2 ft. 3 ins.; depth, 1 ft. 9-3/4 ins. Graceful proportion with cabriole leg.] [Illustration: OAK TABLE. Showing at a later period the last traces of the cabriole leg.]