pids are gone, with the Georgian fair and gallant—“golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust." Yet he lasts, so far-old-young as he is, old-young as he was before my great grandsire was a baby; and who shall bother him by a birth of today? When Machin Chose the purblind, the blinkard, the ever-cheated, came hastening to me proudly to show his purchased brace of forgeries, I had but to put my "large boy" beside them to send him confounded away.

So a word to all forgers of English soft china (for they read whatever is printed about the ware)—"Messieurs, 'tis vain-Herren, 'tis futile! The look, the air, the scratches of the scythe of Time as well as the scrape of the finger-nail on the paste, discomfit you. You may swelter like your furnaces, you may pother like your kilns, but never shall you get your imitative stuff quite right. How should you? Each pottery had its secret recipe, and each potter his own rule-of-thumb; do you suppose those leather-aproned old fellows mixed their clays by the weighed ounce, and their bone-ash by the pennyweight? Not they! A handful of this, a snuff-pinch of that; the experienced guess, the happy knack, the luck of chance-that was how a Francis Thomas at Chelsea, a Thomas Frye at Bow, an Andrew Planché at Derby, and a John Lyes at Worcester concocted. And that was how the pastes came to vary so, in body and texture, in harder softness or softer hardness, in whiteness or creaminess, in weight. All you seem to have learned about it, and all you can imitate, is that the body of English old porcelain was 'soft.' Soft? Just so is Mendelssohnian music soft; but hear a Paderewski! Messieurs and Herren, go to."

Soft are the hues of it, also, soft as the skies of Spring. Into the tender old welcoming substance the colors

sank with sweet affinity, marrying the milky clay with certainty of long life together, if hand of scullery-maid but spared; the dish-cloth scratches to be as the wrinkles which mark a comely old face with the map of a life, and the abraded gilding as the thin-worn nuptial ring of Darby's Joan. Calm smoothness, unfrozen snowiness, chastened color, here; yonder, an icy haughty brightness. On the hard glaze of "Dresden" and "Sèvres" the enamels curd and lie congealed, unpenetrating, flat, not lustrous; apathy if not antipathy between them and the porcelain, like cat and dog on the same hearthrug, the only nexus a quiescent slumber. But in cups of "Chelsea" and saucers of "Swansea" translucency and hue combine, as in the petals of a rose. Oh exquisite rich softnessDelia's lip! Oh liquid trembling light -her pitying eye.

The pen grows lyrical, and with cause, for English old china steps at last to her throne, the queen and bride of Keramos. In Paris to-day illuminati hunt and pay for pâte tendre as if it were gem-set gold. Good souls, they have wearied of the rigid perfection and engine-turned finish of their faultily faultless "Sévres," and they hanker after a porcelain more gentle and whimsical, more peccable and personal-their "Chantilly," their "St. Cloud" that makes a warmer, a more homely appeal. Yet their best in that kind is but so-so, compared with our Chelsea or Derby, our Bow or our Worcester, our Swansea and-climaxNantgarw. . . "Messieurs and Herren, to pronounce that last name illustrious, you give it three syllables that rhyme with kangaroo." . . . True it is, I allow, that we borrowed from France in our beginnings-that Chelsea imported French limners, that perhaps the earliest modeller at Derby was a Frenchman, that a Frenchman first painted the "Lowestoft" rose.

...

But, forthsooth, what of that? We borrowed from borrowers. I could draw a family-tree of china decoration -two trees, indeed-the one with its roots in the Orient, the other growing from Saxon soil. As for the first, all Europe copied the blue and white mandarins, tea-ladies, and dragons; for the other, 'twas Hannong of Dresden who carried the seed into France. The "Lowestoft" bloom was but struck from the Strasburg variety, and certainly never was roseate blossom less like a rose. But our English flower is of Nature herself; William Billingsley first took that rose from her garden at Derby; it bloomed at Nantgarw, Swansea, and Coalport indigenous, as much and peculiarly English as the Worcester paste or the Chelsea glaze. And with it what blossom of the ceramic can compare?

Around the

The ground-colors also! dazzling white panels or "reserves" within which the flowers and birds were limned in England, what noble broad enamels spread! "Sèvres" and "Dresden" themselves were fain to copy her claret hue from "Chelsea." And think of the Worcester lapis-lazuli, salmon, and powder-blue; the Lowestoft carmine; the Derby apple-green and yellow; the cobalt of Longton Hall; the Coalport lake and the Devonport purple! To the color-sense and impressionist eye a cabinet of this old ware "infinite riches in a little room" -gives the delight of a riot of hues, Turneresque; for Time has brushed-in the half-tones, the chymic action of light and air has softened crudity, chastening the primaries; and the play of shine and shadow on the reticulated glazes gives the rest.

The tea-ware pleases me most, for Thea Bohea is the true family-tree of porcelain; but for the "shrub divine" there might have been no call for sublimated vessels that could give the beverage no tang. Because of tea-infu

sion the Orient drank out of china while Europe still swigged at the leather bottel. Tea civilized us at last; pewter and wood might be good enough vesels for ale, but even earthenware mugs could not serve the nice for fine liquors; Ronsard decried them for wine:

Mais contemplons de combien tu sur

passes,

Verre gentil, ces monstrueuses tasses. Crystal was the ware for Ronsard's libations; but only the half-barbaric Russian can drink tea out of glass. Ronsard had been dead three-quarters of a century when Pepys wrote "I did send for a cup of tea, a Chinese drink, of which I had never drunk before"; John Company, that had brought the China drink to London, had brought the china vessels too. From the first tea felt at home in England; in that we are the Western Chinese; but what had Germany, what had France, to do with tea? The making of cups and saucers at Meissen and Vincennes was the flattest of piracy, the most nationally needless; what palate had the Teuton or the Gaul for tea? To this day you shall see a Frenchman who feels unwell degust with nausea the insipid brew he calls "thé”; just as our greatgrandams with the vapors drank camomile. It was here that tea and teacups took out letters of naturalization. "You must understand that there is no good tea to be had anywhere but in London" Madame du Boccage in 1750 wrote home to Rouen.

Not the chimney vases and statuettes. therefore, but the tea-table cups and saucers, jugs and basins, are the characteristic pieces of English old porcelain; a systematic collector (that contradiction in terms, that logician among fantastic hobby-riders) might well confine his acquisitions to those delicate old toys for service in the mittened hands of the Georgian fair. When ladies paid

several crowns a pound for tea they were content to pay several pounds for "Crown Derby" from which to drink the infusion. Till Staffordshire hardened and cheapened it fine English china was never to be had for a song. Doctor Johnson goes to "drink tay" with Mrs. Thrale, and at his eleventh cup berates the foolish costliness of "chaney." He smacks the table, making the saucers ring. "Ma'am, on my journey from Lichfield I visited the Derby pottery, and I protest I could have vessels of silver, of the same size, as cheap as what are made of porcelain there." Delighting in her Worcester tea-set-blue with glints of red and gold-Mrs. Thrale sits smiling at the rusty economist. The pride of those charming old hostesses in their "equipages," in ante-five o'clock days when tea was drunk to a ceremonial! Their personal care of it, though they could not know what value was to accrue! In 1903 a Worcester tea and coffee "equipage," scale-blue with panels of exotic birds and the square mark, was sold at Sotheby's for seven hundred guineas. How Doctor Johnson's shade near by in Fleet Street would growl!

Set a

So "Where's your Wully Shakespeare noo?" say I to the Green Vaults, and the pompous Musée in the green French valley where embattled Saxons came; at tea and tea-ware we vanquish. But not in these alone. Chelsea figure beside a Meissen group, and at once a puerile toyishness and a rococo vulgarity in the German moulds become apparent. I must not go so far as to say that Grand-Ducal Germany, like the Kaiser's realm to-day, was devoid of the very sense of art,-it is perhaps an Elian prejudice which makes me long to say something almost as sweeping; but the "figurines de Saxe" at the best were superior "ornaments for mantel-pieces," and empty of artistic feeling. Sèvres in that century erred by the other excess; her

statuettes were glacial and painfullyperfect porcelain imitations of classical statuary, undersized. They repel me, as do those excellent small copies of famous great pictures which elderly plain spinsters with great industry in the Louvre and the Uffizi so carefully produce; the breath of individual art was never in their nostrils, they were always æsthetically dead. Bacon and Nollekens and Roubiliac modelled for "Bow" and "Chelsea," I know, and had the "figurines de Saxe" for inspiration; but the Bow and Chelsea figures were individualistic and original in spite of that, and quaintly dainty into the bargain. Also they are homely and honest, they do not make pretence or pretension. The Bow figure of Kitty Clive looks what it was, a clay model fresh from the thumb-stroke, instinct and life-breathing, not a chiselled statue in small. Art should fit itself to its material, surely; the art of the Sèvres figures did not. There is also a fitness of niche and surroundings; place me the "Flying Mercury" where Stevenson saw a copy of it, in the open at Grünewald, "tiptoe in the twilight of the stars"; I do not want a Sèvrean Venus de Milo on a console. Give me a metal Perseus of Cellini, if I must have its miniature: give me (in things little) the Derby biscuit figures of the Boy with the Dog-of the Georgian youth who sextons the dead bird, and the Pamela damsel who bewails it; I do not want an Apollo Belvidere in crockery. Such, Messieurs de Sèvres and Herren of Meissen, is my wretched taste.

I-my-me!-how wise was the chinaloving clerk of Leadenhall Street to merge and hide Charles Lamb in Elia! How free what he would have called an Elias makes the pen! One cannot pen on porcelain without ringing out of it the personal note.

China's the passion of his soul.
A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl!

That was sung of Horace Walpole, most personal and individual of letterwriters, read almost wholly now for the personal note. A Worcester vase, a Chelsea beaker delighted him; but I dare say he admired the jars of Kutani, the urns of Sèvres and the "real lace"fringed figures from Dresden as much. Let us permit each other our amiable egoisms in taste. I don't know why I should jeer at a china "George III. in a Vandyke dress, leaning on an altar." I stood before a collection of "Worcester" which an enthusiast had lent to a provincial art-gallery. Said another bystander near, "That covered chocolate-cup cost him sixty pounds! What waste, how ridiculous! If I could collect it would be mediæval wooden images.” Gogs and Magogs were his fancy. And I have heard of a man who possesses thirty-eight grandfather's clocks! Why not? Why jeer? Cannot we be catholic in these things? Myself, could I contrive it, would I not collect Romanesque cathedrals and Renaissance châteaux? Would I not displace, set down in England, line with cabinets of porcelain, hang with early English water-color drawings, and inhabit, the Château d' Azay?

Let my pen repent. With the wilful, planchette-like, bit-between-the-teethish, runaway habit of a pen that every writer knows, it has written hard things about hard "Sèvres"; though the French was once a ware magnificently beautiful, sumptuously fine, I will go to Hertford House again and do penance of admiration; I will recant, I will confess that I have not been catholic in these things. But flatly do I refuse to admire the current twentieth-century "Sèvres" that is hot from the oven, a new and indigestible bread; and likewise I pass from sympathy into apathy, and then into antipathy, when I thread in thought the course and transition which English china-making took a cen

tury ago. About the year 1800 Josiah Spode the younger set himself to "improve" English soft porcelain. He did it with a vengeance he "improved” it out of existence; he mixed an odious unfeeling substance called felspar into his paste, and English soft china fainted, gasped, gave up the ghost. For when Staffordshire began to mix true porcelain, the "beautiful and ingenious counterfeit" began to die.

Happily some remnants of it live, and are liveable with to-day. Though Bloomsbury and South Kensington, Belgravia and county mansion house it in marble halls, better it suits the cornercupboard and the chimney-breast. Something hearth-like, something doglike. about its mute companionship and homely friendliness. It is so human and Adamic; framed of such stuff as we ourselves inhabit awhile-not iron nor brass, nor kaolin, but dust, the common general dust; it shares our mortality, though it exceeds our span. Shades of old English porcelain-potters, once so busy thumping your dough of clay, do ye visit your chipped and tarnished baked wares o' midnights, in the narrow long gallery at South Kensington, in the little antechamber at Bloomsbury? Wringing immaterial hands at sight of the mischief Time has wrought? I dream you do. Dust to dust, heart's ashes reincorporate-was this what ye lived for, toiled for. starved and died for, a handful of white dust shut in a case of glass? The ignorant pass heedless, and the Philistine jeer. But a few elect shall honor ye-now and again a sonnet, an article, shall laurel your brows. Though ye worked in "such stuff as dreams are made on," mortal dreams, and therefore frail and transient-though but a tithe. a hundredth, of your deeds succeeded or remain-you sought to embody use in beauty, to elevate the common and amend the coarse. There lies the high appeal in what you did; for that the

Great Potter smiles, fraternal. He knows of "the potter tempering soft earth," and that "what is the use of either sort the potter is the judge." The Cornhill Magazine.

And shall not He your defects assoil, who works Himself-so often with such apparent failure-in "the precious porcelain of human clay"?

J. H. Yoxall, M.P.

CHAPTER IX.

THE GOOD HEALTH OF MISS VERA AND ILL HEALTH OF THE COLONEL. The Colonel had begun to show the infirmities of age a good deal even by the time that he returned to take up his permanent residence in Barton. Many years of service in India as a young man no doubt were telling on him more now that he was no longer young than at the time. Perhaps the inevitable contrast between the young girl and the old man made us more quick to observe the change than we should have been otherwise, but when attention once was directed to it we could not help remarking that during the past year or two he had become more bent in form, less active and vigorous in step, and less pleasant and alert in conversation.

For a while after his granddaughter came to live with him his nature had seemed to be made softer and more gentle by her presence. But now it was as if that influence were past and spent. With his own grandchild, and even with other children, he was still very gentle and tender, but perhaps this very tenderness towards them made it more difficult not to notice that he had lost again, as it seemed, all his lately acquired geniality and kindliness towards grown-up people. Even his habitual courtesy appeared at times to forsake him. Miss Carey told us, with her ever-ready charity, that she was quite sure the Colonel was feeling his Indian liver. (It was most curious that

Her

she certainly would not have ventured to make mention of such an organ, especially as belonging to one of the other sex, without the geographical adjective before it, but the pre-addition seemed to remove from it all indelicacy.) diagnosis was based on the fact that the Colonel, for the first time in her long acquaintance with him, had declined quite brusquely to give her any financial assistance for one of her poor people in the village.

"Very possibly he may have had his reasons," Miss Carey said. "And if so I have no doubt that they were good ones, but I am very much afraid he is not quite the thing. I wonder whether it would be possible to persuade him to see Dr. Charlton."

Having made up our minds that the Colonel was unwell, it followed naturally that we desired for him the consequence which seemed almost necessary in Barton, that he should see Dr. Charlton; but we were quite at a loss to know how to bring the suggestion to his notice. The Colonel was not the kind of man to allow himself to be persuaded easily, and still retained some of his old dislike of Dr. Charlton as a sceptic and a Radical, although recent events had taught him to do justice to the doctor's goodness of heart, and devotion to his patients. But though the Colonel had never enjoyed robust health during all his stay in Barton, it had been noticed that he never had called for a doctor's services. Such returns of Indian fever as now and again attacked him, he met by doses of qui