Formal apartments and the smaller reception rooms of the eighteenth-century houses of more or less pretension came to feel the need of what one furniture-lover aptly called “a table that was not a table.” In fact, Sheraton insisted that “portables,” as he called consoles, were indispensable in the drawing-room. Marble shelves the width of small--and sometimes, indeed, of very large--tables were supported by brackets along the wall, bringing the shelf to the height of a table top. In earlier examples the bold florid and exaggerated types in soft wood, carved and gilded, often carried decoration to extremes. The consoles found place beneath great mirrors and, occasionally, beneath large paintings, tapestries, and the like. In early consoles there was great variety in their supporting brackets, the motifs of ornament being taken from flowers, foliage, parts of the human form, animal and bird forms, rococo vagaries, and so on. During the Empire the eagle came to be popularly employed as a console support by the French furniture-designers of the time. In the collection of the Duke of Beaufort are a number of the finest examples of the eagle consoles. There are also some fine examples in the state dining-room of the White House. Before long the earliest forms of console supports gave way to more extensive supports and finally these reached the floor, as in those consoles which have the cabriole form of support. Sideboards were unknown during the first part of the eighteenth century, but when the console table was introduced into England, it rapidly developed from the French idea of the luxurious console for ornament’s sake into the generous console table for utility’s sake, which we soon find in the English dining-rooms. It did not take long for this to suggest the sideboard. Reference has already been made to the interest in consoles on the part of the architects of to-day. This brings to mind the fine console tables of the brothers Adam--pieces which the collector will do well to acquire whenever the opportunity presents itself--for Robert Adam was an architect who designed furniture but was not himself a cabinet-maker, though his influence on the classical taste in the furniture of the late eighteenth century was [Illustration: French Console, Louis XIV Period] [Illustration: _Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_ French Console, Louis XV Period] [Illustration: Sèvres White Bisque Statuette of Voltaire] [Illustration: Sèvres White Bisque Bust of Franklin] [Illustration: _Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_ A Pair of Sèvres Porcelain Covered Vases] decided. Robert Adam made exhaustive researches in France and Italy and reached as far as Spalato in Dalmatia, whither his interest in classic design took him.