The potter simulated the porcelain with his enamelled earthenware, the cabinet-maker produced lacquered work which passed muster in Holland and England. Take the house of the rich burgher. The table was covered with an Eastern rug, called a "table carpet." The linen cupboards so beloved by the Dutch were surmounted by Chinese and Japanese porcelain. Often a Japanese lac cabinet gave another touch of colour to the interior. Rich damask curtains, Spanish leather hangings, Oriental rugs, finely inlaid cabinets of ebony and silver, and a glowing array of copper and brass, filled the heart of the Dutch _vrouw_ with pride. Such rooms were regarded as a "holy of holies," and the family had their meals in the kitchen or living room and were warned off the show room. The seventeenth-century Dutchwoman, according to all accounts, seems to have been a shrew. But enough is extant to prove that Holland was artistically, in regard to the home-life of Stadtholder and burgher, resplendent with colour, in spite of the low tones of the canvases of Dutch painters. In England, too, the love of colour was becoming predominant. Fifty thousand Huguenot families, with their Latin blood and love of colour, scattered in the Protestant countries had no inconsiderable influence. Spitalfields silk is as English as the dark and tortuous lanes from which it emanates. But every weaver had a French name, and although the industry has come to an end, tomorrow, if the demand arose, the descendants of these French Huguenots would again stand at the looms to produce English silk. The sudden outburst of colour in the now rarely prized English lacquered cabinets and bureaus must be attributed to the foreign workmen in our midst at the close of the seventeenth century. It is English perforce, because it was made in England. The followers of Huygens the Dutchman and the disciples of Martin the Frenchman were capable of producing something new and something surprising in English cabinet work. The foreign quarters of London have always been the centre of art industry. Armenians sit on the roofs of fashionable West End emporiums and restore carpets and rugs. Polish and Russian furriers travel by the Tube from Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, from the Commercial Road and Shoreditch to Regent Street and Bond Street with their handiwork. What is now, was two hundred and fifty years ago. Alien craftsmen, more skilled than the English workmen, worked for less wages and produced better work. The English style, therefore, of the late seventeenth century in lacquered work was as English as the work of Daniel Marot the Frenchman and of Grinling Gibbons the Dutch woodcarver at Hampton Court.