I do not turn my house into a museum of antiques, but certainly I choose interesting old furniture to live with where choice is possible; it has a cheery influence on your temper. I love to walk amongst my treasures and touch them with my hand and admire their cloistered beauty. I started housekeeping in Victorian days, after the orthodox manner of Englishmen about to marry, by buying new furniture. To get the genuine article I bought it in framework and had it upholstered and finished at home, under my eye. As years rolled on, piece by piece the Victorian furniture vanished from our rooms and old pieces supplanted them, and the rooms grew pleasant to look upon and cosy to sit in. Your furniture has a subtle influence on your disposition. You live with it daily all the year round as you do with your wife, and you married her because she was the girl you loved best in the world, and since the wedding-day her influence has coloured your life more than you can measure and contributed mysteriously to make you the manner of man you are. Your furniture adds much to your pleasure and quiet enjoyment of home life if you have the right sort. Old furniture with quietness of line is the best to live with--it is suggestive of repose. I love old furniture because its workmanship is artistic. Style in a chair or table is the all-important thing. A piece of furniture, however simple in design, if it is wrought artistically, stimulates the imagination, arouses the emotions, and provokes endless delight in the connoisseur. We are keen observers to-day, and curious over work done centuries ago. We handle a well-bred piece of furniture with respect as we trace the skill shown in beauty of line; the eye travels joyously over its well-balanced proportions and hovers with admirance over its downright dexterity of carving. No literal copy of antique furniture made in the forcing factories of to-day has feeling in it. It is very accurate in line and detail but it lacks expression, and that is where the artistic spirit enters, that is where the charm holds us. As old Higgery the carpenter explained himself out of it when Lord Louis Lewis complimented him on being the finest carpenter of his age: "Ah, sir," he replied, "Chippendale was the finest cabinet-maker of his age and Sheraton of his; but they went beyond that. They had the Idea. I can use my tools as well as either of them--better, maybe, for ’tis a subtle thing to give a semblance of age to a new piece, but I haven’t got the Idea, and never had. If the imagination had gone with the craft, King George might have seen his period of furniture as well as any of the others."