Fortunately, dealers in antiques and restorers have acquired nowadays a genuine love of their work, and have learned how best to please their clients; many of them having quite a store of odd handles and fittings for the curio-hunter and would-be amateur restorer to choose from. To be quite certain about getting a suitable style for the restoration or repairs of old furniture it is desirable to know something of the appropriate styles. The drop handle is a foreign importation, for it is said to have come from Japan, being first seen in this country in the Oriental lacquer cabinets brought here in the seventeenth century. Such handles were at first pear-shaped, but they soon became larger and of a type more adapted for drawers and the heavier furniture then in use. Much hand labour was expended upon their manufacture; even in the latter part of the eighteenth century they were filed up by hand. The earliest form of brass handle-plate was the smooth and shiny "willow brass," the edges of which were filed and shaped by hand. Later they were distinguished from the newer styles as "Queen Ann brasses." The handles were fastened to the plates with brass-headed screw bolts (in the commoner types the "plates" were dispensed with). Chippendale and his followers used an adaptation of the willow brass, placing over the plain plate a fretwork grille or ornamental plate of thin brass. Then came the bail handle and the oval plate with beaded ornamentation, adopted by Hepplewhite and Adams. In the meantime, however, the drop and the bail were made in a fancy design in keeping with Chippendale "shells" and ornament. The rosette and ring handle of the year 1800 and onwards is a feature to be noticed, the round plate being pierced in the centre instead of at the sides as in the bail handle. The ring which formed the handle hung from the central screw. This got over the difficulty of the necessary groove in which the old bail handle had fallen, and allowed for a deeper projection and more ornamental stamping. Such handles were in vogue in the Empire period. There were heavier handles, too, which often took the form of a lion's head instead of an ornamental pattern, the ring hanging from the mouth of the lion, these being often miniature replicas of the brass door knocker. These beautiful handles and the delightful brass knockers which were used on furniture and doors concurrently gave way to the ugly handles of the Victorian age, when wood and glass knobs reigned supreme. It was a sad picture of the decadence of popular taste, for there can be no question as to the more artistic and ornamental decorativeness of the brassfounder's art over that of the wood-turner as exemplified by the products of the nineteenth century.