The love of china-ware still continues to be a mania amongst certain classes in this country. In the houses chiefly of the ‘upper ten,’ we see scattered in lavish profusion little Dresden figures, shepherds and shepherdesses, sweet, fresh, smiling, fantastic little loves, leaning on impossible crooks, or ogling us from under trees whose bowery greenery embodies all that is idyllic in crockery. Wonderful little old tea-cups, without handles, transparent as an egg-shell, with no colouring to speak of, faded, washed-out looking, are proudly pointed to as almost priceless. From these our great-great-grandmothers, in all the glories of hoops and furbelows, are said to have drunk their hyson and bohea in their great wainscoted and tapestried rooms, discoursing as they sipped the fragrant nectar, much as we their great-great-granddaughters do still, over our afternoon tea; for the world changes, but the human heart does not. All manner of vanities go the round; trivialities of dress or gossip; much tattling about the mote in our neighbour’s eye, and a careful avoiding, with commendable modesty, any reference even the most remote to the beam in our own. These pale transparent cups going their oft-repeated rounds may have sown in their day the seeds of many a pathetic commonplace tragedy or comedy, disseminating, as they circulated around the board, harmony and peace, or dissension and distrust. Your true china collector has undoubtedly in him something of the antiquarian Dryasdust spirit, which loves to excavate and unearth the buried treasures of the past; in his case, however, it is gracefully blended with and overlaid by an instinctive fondness for the tender, lovely, fragile object of his regard. He knows, for he has often anxiously weighed it, how frail it is. Every time he looks at it he remembers the tumult of conflicting emotions with which, once secured, he packed it up with his own hands, and the fears for its ultimate safety which tempered the ecstatic pride of his triumph in the bargain which he had just struck. To the china-hunter, every object in his cabinet or on his brackets is a trophy. That quaint old enamelled _tazza_ of Lucca della Robbia’s, he bought in Rome; and as he gazes at it he thinks not so much of the astute Jew dealer, for whom, as he flatters himself, his own knowingness was fully a match, but of a long-forgotten holiday, with its bright days of sunshine, and the lengthening purple shadows of night deepening over the skies, and the grapes in ripe clusters on the wall. How well he remembers their flavour still, and the hand that plucked them for the stranger, and the eyes that looked into his! What was her name? He has forgotten it. What her fate? He has never known. A most prosaic ending, truly, to a vanished romance. But her charming grace and beauty unforgotten, blend still in his memory like a sweet rhythmical chant, and beautify with a glory not altogether its own this rare old cup of Lucca della Robbia’s.