As to cabinets, they are the most precious, if not the most useful of all pieces of furniture. They have generally been intended to hold family treasures, are not required to be moved, and have therefore been the richest and most decorated objects in the room. Cabinets are the legitimate descendants of the chests of former days containing bridal outfits and trinkets, or plate, jewellery, and other valuables. They were carried from town to country, from grange to castle. About the beginning of the sixteenth century, the personal habits of great men became less nomad, and their chests were no longer liable to be packed and moved away. These receptacles were mounted on stands at which height the lids could not be lifted, and doors were substituted. Drawers took the place of shelves or compartments, and every sort of ingenuity was applied to make these pieces of furniture quaint and splendid inside and out.
As to shape, it is contrary to their purpose of convenience and interior capacity, to make cabinets, cupboards, or other receptacles, with showy and spreading architectural details, such as cornices, architraves, columns, pediments, and the like. All these parts, which are laborious and costly in construction, are so many additions to its size, and make no more room inside to compensate for this expenditure. Cabinets should, in propriety, be as big and convenient inside as their size would lead us to expect.
On the other hand, the many fine examples made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in this country, Holland, Germany, France or elsewhere, have been generally intended for rooms larger, higher, and with fewer pieces of furniture in them than those of our modern houses, not to speak of the massiveness of fireplaces and fittings with which they were in character. It is their age, and the connection, which we cannot help tracing, with old houses and bygone generations which give architectural cabinets an interest now.
In construction, the skill of the cabinet maker will be shown in the neat and convenient arrangement of drawers of various depths and sizes, shelves or repositories, so contrived as to turn the entire internal space to account. The most curious contrivances are often found in old German, English, and French cabinets, bureaux, secrétaires, and other varieties of this kind of furniture. Pediments, capitals of columns, and other parts of architectural fronts are made to open, and secret drawers stowed away with an ingenuity almost humorous. It is upon the fronts and stands that the skill of great masters of the craft has been bestowed. The large wardrobes, or "armoires," of Boulle are examples of great inventive and designing power, as well as the marquetry of Riesener and David, and the chiselled metal-work of Berain, Gouthière, and that of many English artists.