The painting on the steatitic porcelain differs in style from that of the ordinary blue and white of this period. It is executed with delicate touches like miniature painting, and every stroke of the brush tells, the effects being produced by fine lines rather than by graded washes. The ware, being costly to make, is usually painted by skilful artists and in the finest blue. Fig. 3, of Plate 93, is an excellent example of the pure steatitic ware, an incense bowl in the Franks collection, of which the base and a large part of the interior is unglazed and affords a good opportunity for the study of the body material. The glaze is thin and faintly crackled, and the design--Hsi Wang Mu and the Taoist Immortals--is delicately drawn in light, clear blue. The second type, which has only a dressing of steatite over the ordinary body, has neither the same lightness nor the opacity of the true steatitic ware, but it has the same soft white surface, and is painted in the same style of line drawing. There are, besides, other opaque and crackled wares painted in underglaze blue, which are also described as “soft paste,” and, indeed, deserve the name far more than the steatitic porcelain. The creamy, crackled copies of old Ting wares, for instance, made with _ch’ing tien_ stone,[291] are occasionally enriched with blue designs; and the ordinary stone-coloured crackle with buff staining is also painted at times with underglaze blue,[292] or with blue designs on pads of white clay in a crackled ground. On the other hand, there are numerous wares of the Yung Chêng and Ch’ien Lung periods which are probably composed in part, at least, of steatite. They are usually opaque, and the surface is sometimes dead white, sometimes creamy and often undulating like orange peel, and in addition to blue decoration, enamel painting is not infrequent on these later types. The purely steatitic porcelains are generally of small size, which was appropriate to the style of painting as well as to the expensive nature of the material. The furniture of the scholar’s table, with its tiny flower vases for a single blossom, its brush washers and water vessels of fanciful forms, its pigment boxes, etc., were suitable objects for the material, and many of these little crackled porcelains are veritable gems. Snuff bottles are another appropriate article, and a representative collection of snuff bottles will show better than anything the great variety of these mixed wares and so-called “soft pastes.”