short time he can be in London or on his
English property. He has all the freshness of
adventure and enterprise of a far-off land,
and yet he is in the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland. Not an hour but has
its object—not a year, for many a year to
come, but has some great hope to realise. He
has made a canal, roads, and new plantations.
Above all, he has created a branch of industry,
scarcely ever followed before his time:- he
has established fisheries; which not only give
employment to many who would be otherwise
starving, but afford a wholesome change
of food to his agricultural peasants. His
villages and schools lie warm and bright
before him, all warmly nestling round his
heart. There is no danger of his neglecting
his Irish estate; if he do not, on the
contrary, neglect his English one.

Sir Thomas is one of a now rapidly
increasing number, who are engaged in a new
planting of Ireland—more fortunate than the
planting of Munster—for it requires not a
single soldier; and tends only to a union of
races, to the employment of a people who
have passed through subjugation, proscription,
and famine, to the final peace, it is to
be hoped, of progressive industry and
enlightenment.

POTTERY AND PORCELAIN.

WE are familiar nowadays with plates and
dishes furnished by the potter, and need not
be very rich before we have it in our power
to drink tea and coffee out of porcelain.
Indeed, there is scarcely a dust-heap in the
country that does not contain fragments of
European pottery. But these fragments would
have been kept in a velvet case some hundred
years ago; for although the potter's art is
very ancient, it is perhaps not very
generally known that the extent to which a
taste for something very much harder than
crockery prevailed in the dear old middle
ages, gave so little countenance to the potter,
that his arts had to be rediscovered; and a
complete history of the rise and progress of
our jugs and mugs, as they are now daily in
familiar use, need not begin at a date very
much earlier than the reign of good Queen
Bess. A china mug, such as we now label " A
Present for Elizabeth " the little daughter,
was, in those days, a fit present for Elizabeth
the great queen, and was a gift actually made
to her by a wealthy subject. Yet Elizabeth
was far from simple in her tastes; the
gold and silver plate, which was in use among
the high and mighty in those days that knew
not china, was in her establishment displayed
on a scale calculated to astonish all
ambassadors. Her Mightiness had also a wardrobe
of two thousand dresses; yet, even to
her sophisticated taste, most grateful was the
present of a china mug.

There being no crockery for table use
among the English before the time of
Elizabeth,
is a large deduction to be made from the
comfort of the good old times. We may name
another deduction:- the want of looking-
glasses by the ladies, who were said to have
been content with peeping at themselves in
buckets of water. It is enough, however, to
say, that they had no crockery, and the very
rich used gold and silver plate, while humbler
people used a composition very much like our
pewter, called electrum. " Change silver
plate or vessel," Bacon says, " into the
compound stuff, being a kind of silver electre,
and turn the rest to coin." We change our
silver plate now also into " a compound stuff
—a kind of electre," or electro-plate. Alas
for the poor rich! When porcelain was very
dear, they rejoiced greatly, abandoned their
metallic cups and dishes, and luxuriated
in china-ware. Porcelain became cheap;
expensive cups were closely imitated, and so,
as far as comfort permitted, the rich went
back to their gold and silver plate again.
Now gold and silver plate is closely imitated.
If a man has a set of silver dish-covers, he cannot
be ostentatious if he will, for all men
charitably suppose him to possess discretion,
and believe that they are plated. Gold and
silver will be dethroned from their places at
the festive board, as china has been, whenever
anybody will discover something else that is
extremely dear, and for a while, at any rate,
able to defy the imitator.

Crockery, we all know, has, in its day, been
idolised by men of taste and fashion, in their
generation. Augustus the Strong, who wore
a helmet weighing twenty pounds, and could
break a horse-shoe into fragments with his
finger and thumb, was called the Porcelain
King; he gave, on one occasion, a regiment
of dragoons in exchange for twenty-two large
vases. At the late Mr. Beckford's sale, in
Bath, the accumulation of cups and saucers
might have been fairly underlined as " most
stupendous," by the auctioneer. It was said
that Mr. Beckford had so many sets of china,
that he could have breakfast served to him in
a new set every day throughout the twelve-
month. Addison has left word to us
concerning his own time, that "China vessels" are
playthings for women of all ages. An old
lady of fourscore shall be as busy in cleaning
an Indian Mandarin, as her great-grand-
daughter is in dressing her baby." Kings
were the China merchants in those palmy
days, and fostered the potter's art so as to
encourage the production of luxurious
services. Of one service made at Chelsea,
Horace Walpole tells us that the price was
one thousand two hundred pounds. In our
own day large prices are given by collectors
for rare specimens of early manufacture. A
pair of " singularly fine cups," without any
saucers, fetched, at the Strawberry Hill sale,
twenty-five guineas; and, unfortunately, came
to the hands of their purchaser broken in
the packing. A small coffee-cup, at Stowe,