This type is the plainest possible, and suggests that little of any value preceded it. It leaves one with queer imaginings as to what the Tudor form may have been like. But one must not be too exacting. A glance at table manners gives modern precisians a shock. There was a common dish, at which all helped themselves. The habit of putting the hands into this dish to seize bits of meat does not seem to have been regarded as objectionable. This was in the fifteenth century. There were no soup plates till about the year 1600. Nor was there any large spoon for serving from the tureen till about a hundred years later, that is about 1700. The Lambeth delft candlestick, with coat of arms, dated 1648, is more symmetrical than the example of the silversmith. It has the platform for the grease, similar to later examples in the next reign made of gun-metal, and very heavy. Charles II Examples There was an extraordinary demand for silver plate in the reign of Charles II. This is indicated in the diaries of Pepys and of Evelyn. We illustrate a pair of especial beauty and delicacy (p. 227). These candlesticks were sold at Christie’s in 1908 for £1,420. They are 11 inches in height, and they bear the London hall-mark for 1673. The barrel is short, and fluted to represent a cluster of eight small columns. The barrel is connected with a cast and vase-shaped stem, ornamented with four lobes and four acanthus leaves. The platform has voluting shells, and the base is composed of four escalop shells. There is a delicacy about these candlesticks which is Italianate in character. From the barrel to the base the lines are graceful and subtle. There is nothing like them in English silver. They suggest the fanciful design of the best Japanese art, centuries before that art had penetrated Europe. Remarkable in many respects, it is representative of the joyousness and vivacity of the Restoration; they have no forbears and no successors. They are unique. The fluted column was a form which appealed to the Carolean maker. In square bases with platforms inverted, this type departs from the fanciful curves of the pair illustrated. The straight line is predominant in the base, the platform, and the socket. Sometimes the baluster ornament of the seventeenth century is introduced in the stem. Other late Stuart forms include the type with octagonal base, sometimes plain hammered, and deep, from which the stem springs as from a pan, and other forms with fluted column still on octagonal base, which in the later days of the seventeenth century began to be more subdued in character. By the middle of the seventeenth century the platform disappears in silver candlesticks.