passes, dry tissue paper is rubbed over with a brush, until not a crease is visible. A soapy flannel is passed over the surface, and the reverse end of the brush is freely used to rub the pattern well on. A sponge and water remove the paper. The firing incorporates the color with the glaze. The engraving of the copper plates is a costly undertaking, hence only in the execution of large orders is printing resorted to, it costing less to decorate by hand where a small order is concerned. A separately engraved plate is necessary in each case where the vessel differs in size or form from its predecessors-e.g., the plate used in printing a gravy dish or a meat plate would be useless for printing a vegetable-dish cover, or a gravy tureen. As we left the ingenious printers, and their careful transfers, we turned in at the "ground-laying" workshop. "This ground-laying is very fashion able just now," observed our instructor. "You see how it is managed. The 'color' is dusted on to the piece, after the latter has been oiled all over. This is followed by a 'firing,' and subsequently by another dusting of 'color' and a second 'firing,' when the Selected tint results." In conclusion, we pass from an imperfect description of many interesting processes to the general statement that the productions of the Royal Crown Derby Porcelain Works are unsurpassed by any in the kingdom; they are at once highly artistic and useful. Among the most beautiful of the chefs-d'œuvre of the plastic art are the exquisite egg-shell like cups and saucers, than which we have seen nothing superior. Professor Jewitt thus writes of them: "The 'body' is of a high degree of transparency, of marvellous thinness and of extreme hardness and tenacity, and on some examples, the raised gold-pattern is in the finest and most delicate of lines, or fault. In and yet without flaw whatever style, indeed, the decoration of these choice cabinet specimens is done, there is a studied delicacy and beauty that are in keeping with the apparently fragile body of which they are composed." Amongst the most ardent admirers of Crown Derby ware are the citizens of the United States and Australia. Few of these who are true lovers of art return to their own country after visiting England, without making a run into Derbyshire, and selecting trophies of excellence and beauty from the show-room cabinets. The January of the year 1890 opened brightly for the Derby China Works. By the intervention of his grace the Duke of Devonshire, K.G., lord-lieutenant of the county, and lord high steward of the borough of Derby, the gracious permission of the queen was accorded to the company to use the title of "Royal" in connection with their manufactures. When it is membered for how many years royalty has patronized the ceramics of this factory, and that the manufac ture of china was commenced here a year earlier than at Worcester, which has long since enjoyed the title, the permission accorded to Derby is no more than is befitting. JAMES CASSIDY. re From Good Words. A PLEA FOR PRECOCIOUS CHILDREN. "Master Thomas Moore in his youth devised in his father's house in London a goodly hanging of fine painted cloth with nine pageants, and verses over every pageant. "In the first was painted a boy playing at the top and scourge (whipping top) and over the top was written: I am called Childhood, in play is all my mind, To cast a quoit, a cockstele [shuttlecock?] or a ball. A top can set and drive it in its kind; day. If there is a touch of Blake in the simplicity of these charming lines, there is also, in the matter of them, a healthy satisfaction in ignorance, a distaste for instruction that should commend them to those most respectable authorities on all that relates to children, the mothers of fine, large healthy, stupid families. Listening to these kindly dogmatists, one learns that any sign of intelligence in a child under seven is a kind of disease to be regarded with concern if, by a mira cle, it appears in one's own family, and with suspicion and marked disapproval in the household of one's neighbors. "I have asked eight mothers to let their children join mine in a modest kindergarten class," said a quick-witted young matron the other day, "and they have all refused on the plea that their children's brains are so highly developed that the doctor won't hear of their learning anything. I am driven to the conclusion that mine are the only normally stupid children, or that I am less pervious to flattery than my neighbors." So, slaves to this new superstition, we deprive our children of the advantage of being able to read story-books in the early years when lessons are short and leisure is ample. We prescribe fairy-tales, and "Alice in Wonderland" for all "natural children," while "Nature" has already strung some little minds to a romantic pitch, that only "Ivanhoe" or the tale of Troy can satisfy. "A child," we dogmatize, "ought to be a child," as if every child had not an indefeasible right to be himself. Yet more than a hundred years ago a certain wise Scotchwoman, the Countess of Mar, knew better than this. She and her old lord had been left guardians to the first little CountessDuchess of Sutherland, and when her husband showed some distrust of education for the child, Lady Mar had her answer ready, "Hoots, my Lord, ye will never manage a thinking human child into a hedge-sparrow a' the gither." Now, if even an average human child refuses after all to live the careless, contented life of a fowl of the air, what are we to expect from the extraordinary children? No one denies that men and women of genius are in the course of nature, are, indeed, the fruit and crown of nature-why, then, should a child of genius be looked on with suspicion, disapproval or dismay? Yet we affect to pity the mother whose child, dreamily imaginative, or original and inquisitive, or high-spirited and enterprising, has upset all our prescriptions of what a child ought to be. A gifted man or woman in the future may possibly not be a comfortable child in the present, he will certainly not be a usual one. Mothers of healthy, stupid children are welcome to point triumphantly to Walter Scott at the bottom of his class in the Edinburgh High School, only when they have explained away the other fact of the marvellous lame child of two years old lying on the bank below Smailholm, watching the thunderstorm and shouting "Bonnie, bonnie" at each flash. They may speak with horror and indignation of that "shocking example" in education, the intellectual precocity of John Stuart Mill: Let them at least remember that the child who could not remember the time when he began Greek, but who had certainly read six Platonic dialogues before he was eight, was yet the most elastic as well as the most reasoning optimist of his time. And yet, as in many healthy human prejudices, there is something to jus tify this dread of unusual gifts or rather of gifts unduly developed at an early age. Too many wonderful children have been like "the rathe primrose that forsaken dies." Either the flame, burning too brightly, has shattered the frail vessel that held it, or the premature ripening of the powers was itself Nature's protest against foredoomed decay, or-and this is most likely--the promise and graciousness of such gifted children, early dead, have left a clear light of memory, while the green earth has closed silently over unnum bered little ones whose sweet round bodies and tender ways were no more different from those of other children than one flower of the field differs from the next. More than two hundred years ago there died, at the age of five, a child whose early knowledge, singular piety, and incomparable promise so worked on his father's heart that he, who else concerned himself chiefly with gardens and buildings and the movements of states and societies, has given us the most moving picture of a child's life and death ever limned by paternal pride and sorrow. Under the date January 27, 1658, Evelyn writes: "Died my dear son Richard, to our inexpressible grief and affliction, five years and three days old, but at that tender age a prodigy of wit and understanding, for beauty of body a very angel, for endowment of mind of incredible and rare hopes." It was an age which had none of our prejudices against introducing children early to the dryer studies. There is the wellknown letter in exquisite writing addressed to his "Sweet, sweet father," which attests that little Charles I. was declining substantives and adjectives at the age of five. So it is perhaps only grievous and not miraculous that little Evelyn at the age of four had "got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin and vice versa, construe and prove what he read," and so on through a list of acquirements that would do credit to a Shrewsbury scholar. It was the child's love of learning that was extraordinary. Still more remarkable and more affecting was his apprehension of the things of God. His father tells us that "his sense of God was astonishing." Conscience seems to have been as early awake as intelligence in this gentle child. "He understood his Bible and New Testament to a wonder, how Christ came to redeem the world, and how, comprehending these necessaries himself, his godfathers were discharged of their promises." Even simple children feel the august beauty of the Old Testament when they are wisely permitted to receive the Word itself, weakened neither by paraphrase nor elucidation, but few could appropriate its language to their own case as Richard Evelyn did, dying in his "cradle:" "He would of himself select the most pathetic Psalms and chapters out of Job to read to his maid during his sickness, telling her, when she pitied him, that all God's children must suffer affliction." A child so singularly endowed could not fail to excite hopes and ambitions in his father's heart; but for himself he seemed, by a strange intuition, to understand the vanities of the world before he had seen them. It is diffi cult to remember that it is a child of five of whom we are told: "The day before he died he called me to him and, in a manner more serious than usual, he told me for all I loved him so dearly I should give my house, land, and all my things to his brother Jack. He should have none of them." And then immediately after comes the childlike perplexity as to whether he might pray with his hands unjoined. "What shall I say," adds the father, "of his fre quent pathetical ejaculations uttered of himself: 'Sweet Jesus, save me, deliver me, pardon my sins, let Thine angels receive me'?" It was a special grace in this incomparable child that superiority to other children with him took the form of precocious patience and tolerance. "He would give grave advice to his brother John, bear with his impertinence, and say he was but a child!" A certain aloofness from their fellows-in whose ingenuous bosoms superiority excites distrust, contempt and irritation-is the inevitable bane of remarkable children, and constitutes the worst danger of precocity. According to temperament this solitude of superiority may produce pathetic self-distrust, or proud and morbid irritability, or an aggressive self-complacency. Perhaps this last is the special and unlovely snare of little girls. They have not been subjected to the criticism of school life, they have all the sense of responsibility for other people's sins innate in the feminine conscience. A generation earlier than Richard Evelyn, little Mistress Lucy Apsleywhose boast it was later to be known merely as the wife of Colonel Hutchison-was an object of fond admiration to her parents and of terror and distaste to other children. "Play among other children I despised, and when I was forced to entertain such as came to visit me I tried them with more grave instructions than their mothers, plucked all their babies (dolls) to pieces, and kept all the children in such awe that they were glad when I entertained myself with older company, to whom I was very acceptable." Even for that older company Mistress Lucy had critical eyes. She discovered that the tutor who taught her Latin was a "pitiful, dull fellow," and probably pronounced equally forcible judgments on the half-dozen teachers who, in her eighth year, taught her "languages, music, dancing, writing and needlework." It is pleasant to learn that Latin, sermons, and contempt for her needle, did not entirely fill up Mistress Lucy's hours, and that, "though she exhorted her mother's maids and turned their idle discourse to good subjects," she "thought it no sin to learn or hear witty songs, and amorous sonnets and poems, and twenty things of this kind, wherein I was so apt that I was the confidante" -one wonders at what age precisely "in all the loves that were managed among my mother's young women." It was lute playing and sonnets as well as godly discourse that formed the prelude to Mrs. Lucy's own married life, the record of which, more than any other book, has preserved for us the humane and dignified spirit that animated the nobler Puritan households. It is the peculiar praise of women like Lucy Hutchison, in whom the intellectual virtues predominate, that, more than others, they can merge themselves in the man-father, husband, or son-in whom their love and pride are centred. Perhaps their superior intel ligence convinces them how little a woman can effect alone, how much through the man she inspires and sustains. "So as his shadow she waited upon him," she writes of herself and her husband, "till he was taken into that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing." na The women we have agreed to find charming are precisely the opposite of all this. They are born princesses by the divine right of all-bountiful ture. How can they walk in the shadow when it is heir blessed distinction to reflect every ray of sunshine? How can they efface themselves when every one they meet treasures their individuality as we treasure a rare flower? They may profess no art, but they offer a subject for every art; they are rarely conspicuous for learning, but the learned are ambitious to talk and understand their language; they may not abound in "good works," but the sight of their grace and gladness fills with generous pleasure the hearts of the poor and wearied. Life is the art in which they are past masters, and the hearts of men and women the instruments from which they draw their concords. Where these gifts are bestowed they necessarily show themselves among the earliest instincts. There are babygirls who establish the tenderest relations with elderly admirers long before they can stand alone; there are little girls not yet in their teens who can entertain a company with their wit and tact and sensibility, and then relapse, with captivating quaintness, into simple, childish play. Miss Burney, whose eyes were as kind as they were keen, has described such a precocious charmer in the person of little Selina Birch, whom she met at Tunbridge in the company of Mrs. Thrale. "She [Selina Birch] is the niece of the charming Mrs. Pleydell, and very like her . . . As you have seen that sweet woman, only imagine her ten years old and you will see her sweet niece. She sings like her, laughs like her, and alternately softens and ani mates like her. Her conversation is not merely like that of a woman already, but of an uncommonly informed, cultivated, sagacious woman, and at the same time she can at pleasure ding off all this rationality and make herself a mere playful, giddy, romping child." There must have been extraordinary tact about a child who could first sing with "mingled grace and buffoonery" then run into the middle of the 100m and try some new step or a dance and finally fling herself affectionately into somebody's lap without her "vagaries growing tiresome." Poor little woman of the world, she was "distractedly fond of the French opera. She told us the story right through of some of them, singing the sujet, when she came to the airs, and comically changing parts in the duets." "We hardly know how to get away from her when the carriage was ready to take us from Tunbridge," and Mrs. Thrale confidently predicted that whether they met the "sweet syren" again or not, nothing was so certain as that they would hear of her again, let them go whither they would. Whether that prophecy was fulfilled in days when Mrs. Thrale was Madame Piozzi-and somewhat discredited-and Miss Burney was taxing her lively observation to make her dismal court life endurable, we have no means of knowing. We, at least, have not heard of her again, though one would like to think that somewhere, in some old manor-house, a miniature may exist of a beautiful woman with bright eyes under her powdered hair, and that perhaps some modern Selina owes her formal name and tuneful voice to a greatgrandmother whose wit and melody have left a pleasant tradition among her descendants. There is, of course, much delusion about the precocity of many children. The humor of half their reported sayings lies in the ear of the grown up hearer. The anthropomorphisms which appal and divert the listening mother are as serious and unimaginative to the child as the crudest my There is no thology to the savage. child, however dull, of whom some funny sayings cannot be reported. Let us enjoy these as windfalls without putting any stress on them as indications of ability. Sensibilities of all kinds are a safer test, including nightly fears. and a haunting intimacy with vampires and the Witch of Endor. Perhaps we can best gauge a child's gifts by his power of playing. The precocious child differs radically from the child of genius in this respect, that the former is ever reaching forward to anticipate his share in grownup life, whereas the latter, absorbed in his own proper business, draws all the elements of grown-up life into his play. If any one would know the perfect method of the child of genius explained and illustrated, he can find it in every page of Louis Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verses." To that gentle and spirited child, grown-up people seem to be a mere background to the drama he is constantly acting to himself. He has the true artist's sensitiveness to all that offers material to his art, ali his unaffected indifference to all that lies outside it. Only at times is he concerned at the curious insensibility of his relations to the real nature of a world in which he works and they sit idle. Parents sitting in the warmth of the fire and the witchery of the lamp. light miss their opportunity and merely Sit at home, and talk and sing, And never play at anything. Uncles and gardeners are perversely unconscious of the enchanted ground on which they tread, but it only excites the kindly regret, Oh how much wiser you would be To play at Indian wars with me. But nothing can be more futile than to generalize about the methods of genius or the ways of children. There is one precocious child, who, to the endless inventiveness and exquisite honesty of a child, has added the sensibility of a young woman, and the point and wit of an old one. Thanks to her wise and tender biographer, Pet Marjorie is as well known in most |