which he had put only to liberal and honourable
use.

.And now that we have come to speak of
porcelain, we must begin, of course, with the
Chinese, who have made porcelain from very
ancient times, and built a tower of it near
Nankin, in the year 1277. The Portuguese,
as we have said, first introduced the fine wares
of China into European use. The Chinese
told sad tales about the way in which their
porcelain was made. The earth had to be
kept in heaps, some hundred years; or, said
another, no, it was no earth at all, but sea-
shells and egg-shells were the articles out of
which it was manufactured. The Chinese,
like ourselves, admire old china; so the
merchants fabricate old china very zealously, to
meet the public taste. .Father Solis, a Portuguese
missionary, wrote a treatise on the
frauds of the Chinese. It was never printed,
probably because it would have made a bigger
volume than the publishers of those days cared
to speculate upon. There is a fat little figure
common on Chinese porcelain, which is a
picture of Pousa, the divinity of porcelain.
Once upon a time, an emperor ordered a set
of cups and saucers to be made within a given
period, and of a given pattern. It was
represented to him that the terms of his order were
impossible, and so he was determined that they
should be carried out. The workmen toiled
under the bastinado, till at last one of them,
Pousa, became desperate, and leapt out of the
reach of the stick, into the furnace. He was
gone immediately; the porcelain came out of
the fire perfect— the emperor rejoiced, and
decreed the honours of a god to Pousa.
Yellow being the colour of the sun, and the
sun's brother, is used only for the manufacture
of imperial porcelain. The Chinese use
grotesque figures, as we know. They have a taste
that way. One of their ideas is a porcelain
cat, into whose head they put a lamp at night,
to the intense terror of the mice. Another is
a mug constructed as a " hydraulic surprise,"
which spills its contents over a person's clothes
when he attempts to drink out of it.

The Japanese make porcelain not unlike
that of China, but painted with better taste.
The expulsion of the missionaries from Japan
is a subject which we discussed when out
upon our Phantom Voyage to that country.
We may add now a story of the porcelain
lovers, that this event was entirely caused by
the innovation made upon the old system of
cup painting; the missionaries having
persuaded artists, to the honour of established
authority and custom, to paint Christian
religious pictures on the cups and dishes.

We come now to talk of the first European
porcelain, and that was made at Dresden.
For two centuries chemists in Europe had
laboured in vain to imitate the porcelain
imported by the Portuguese. John Frederick
Böttcher, an apothecary's lad, fled from
Berlin to Saxony, having the misfortune to
be believed capable of making gold. The
elector of Saxony was then Augustus II.
Augustus sent for the stripling, and asked
about his golden secret, of which he desired
possession. The elector then placed him
under the eye of Tschirnhaus, who was busy
in his laboratory with the labour of discovering
an universal medicine. While at work
after the philosopher's stone, then, Böttcher
made some crucibles, which unexpectedly
turned out with a strong resemblance to the
Oriental porcelain. It was not real porcelain,
but something like it, red in colour.

Augustus saw the drift of this, and sent
young Bottcher off to the castle of Albrechtsburg
at Meissen, where he made him comfortable,
but placed him under close watch.
When Charles the Twelfth invaded Saxony,
Böttcher, Tschirnhaus, and three workmen,
were sent, under an escort of cavalry, to a
safer laboratory, in the fortress of Königstein.
Thence his fellow-prisoners planned an escape;
but Böttcher prudently revealed the plan,
and earned for himself more trust in future.
In 1707 he came back from Dresden, where
he and Tschirnhaus had a house and laboratory
built for them. They laboured indefatigably,
sometimes sitting at the furnace day
and night for half a week together. Tschirnhaus
died next year; but Böttcher persevered
alone. At length he had so far succeeded,
that Augustus established the great
manufactory at Meissen, of which, in 1710, he
appointed Böttcher the director. In 1715 he
succeeded in the manufacture of a real fine
porcelain, and survived the discovery but
four years, dying at thirty-seven, a victim to
intemperance.

The manufacture of good porcelain
required the discovery of a fit sort of porcelain
clay; and this had been made by chance, in
an odd manner. John Schnorr, a wealthy
iron-master, riding near Clue, found that his
horse's feet were sticking in a soft white
earth; and his attention being thus directed
to this white earth, it occurred to him that
it would make a first-rate substitute for
flour, as hair-powder. To that use he turned
it, therefore, with much profit to himself,
under the name of "Schnorr's white earth."
Böttcher was among those who used it; and,,
observing its earthy nature, tested it, and
found, to his great joy, that this was just
the thing he wanted to perfect his porcelain.
The Elector then caused the earth to be taken
to the factory in sealed barrels, under conditions
of the utmost secrecy. The manufactory
at Meissen now became a fortress; the
portcullis was down day and night. Every workman
was sworn to secrecy; the superior
officers were sworn every month. " Dumb till
Death " was inscribed, in large letters, within
all the workshops, and imprisonment for life
the penalty denounced against all tale-bearing.
The king himself took oath of secrecy
concerning all that he might see whenever he
visited the factory. For there was in trade the
age of Mysteries before the age of Patents.