The popularity of this porcelain pattern must not be ascribed to superior beauty or cheapness, for to the eye of taste surely a pure plain white plate is infinitely superior to an unfeeling copy of a Chinese pagoda, bridge, and willow-tree “in blue print.” The fact is that the bugbear of a vulgar mind—“fashion”—long rendered it imperative upon every good housewife and substantial householder to keep up a certain dinner-set of earthenware, consisting of two soup-tureens and a relative proportion of dishes and vegetable-dishes, with covers, soup-plates, dinner-plates, and dessert-plates, which were all to correspond; and should any accidental breakage of crockery take place, it was a manufacturing trick to make it a matter of extra-proportionate expense and difficulty readily to replace the same unless it happened to be of “the blue willow pattern.” The practice, however, of using for the dessert-service plates of Worcester china painted by hand, and the execution of many of which as works of art call for our admiration as much as any enamel, created a taste for forming what are called harlequin sets, among which, if a few plates happen to be “Smash’d to shivers,” the value of the whole set is only proportionately depreciated, and what has been broken may perhaps be advantageously replaced. [Picture: Earl of Essex] If you like, we will return to the inner hall, where is a portrait of the celebrated Earl of Essex, an undoubted original picture, dated 1598, three years previous to his being beheaded (Zucchero), and from it at once enter the library, or breakfast-room. Here there is a superbly carved Elizabethan chimney-piece. [Picture: Elizabethan chimney-piece]