After the Reformation, coloured prints superseded the painted and manuscript “poesies” of the nuns and monks, and the elder De Passe, and other artists of the period of James I. and Charles I., produced a variety of oval and circular engravings, which were pasted upon roundels and varnished over. The subjects generally selected were those which naturally arranged themselves into a set of twelve, as the months. By the Puritans the beechen roundels thus decorated were regarded with especial dislike, and they returned to the use of the unadorned trencher and “godly platter.” When the “Merry Monarch” was restored he brought over with him from Holland plates and dishes manufactured at Delft, where the porcelain known as Faenza, Faience, Majolica, and Fynlina ware, made during the fifteenth century in the North of Italy, and upon the embellishments of which, according to Lamartinière, the pencils of Raffaelle, Giulio Romano, and the Caracci, were employed, had been successfully, although coarsely imitated. And it must be confessed that many of the old Dutch plates, dishes, and bowls, upon the kitchen-shelves of the Pryor’s Bank, deserved to be admired for boldness of design, effective combinations of colour, and the manual dexterity displayed in the execution of the patterns. The superior delicacy of the porcelain of China, which about this time began to be imported freely into England from the East caused it to be preferred to the “Dutch ware,” and the consequence of international commerce was, that the Chinese imitated European devices and patterns upon their porcelain, probably with the view of rendering the article more acceptable in the Dutch and English markets. But while the Chinese were imitating us, we were copying their style of art in the potteries of Staffordshire, with the commercial manufacturing advantage given by the power of transferring a print to the clay over the production of the same effect by means of the pencil, an idea no doubt suggested by our roundels of Charles I.’s time, and which process became of the same relative importance as printing to manuscript. This was the origin of our common blue-and-white plate, or what is known as “the willow pattern,” where “Walking through their groves of trees, Blue bridges and blue rivers, Little think those three Chinese They’ll soon be smash’d to shivers.”