The twenty-four pages of "Cutts" include designs for "Powder Boxes," "Looking glass frames," "For Drauers for Cabbinets to be placed according to your fancy," and "For a Standish for Pen Inke and paper which may also serve for a comb box." The drawings include "An Embassy," "A Pagod Worshipp in ye Indies," and another sketch in which the central figure would appear to be a hybrid Red Indian before whom several devotees are grovelling. We have quoted John Stalker at some length as giving interesting sidelights on an industry occupying the attentions of a numerous class in his own day. For the actual carrying out of the methods employed we must refer the reader to the book itself--a book which is invaluable to any one who has a piece of Old English lac in want of repair. There is an old-world charm about the work of the Stalker and contemporary schools, but in point of real beauty it is as far removed from the Japanese lacquer as the "Oriental" porcelain of the eighteenth-century European factories is from its Chinese or Japanese prototype. The complaint has often been made of the lack of perspective in the Oriental decorations. This may be said, to use a hackneyed phrase, to be the defect of its qualities. We have by this time come to see things to a certain extent through Japanese eyes, and have learnt to love the defect. The artist of Old Japan--be he painter, potter, metal-worker, or lacquerer--was an artist to his finger-tips, and his work was full of a symbolism utterly incomprehensible to the Western mind. Those in Japan who know will tell you that a master lacquerer of the seventeenth century would spend many years on the decoration of a simple, small box. In the initial stage--the preparation of the background--it has been calculated that 530 hours are required in the aggregate for drying the various layers; but the young ladies at Mrs. Priest's school at Great Chelsey in the seventeenth century expect, by the aid of Stalker's instructions, to learn the art in twelve lessons! Honest John Stalker thinks he can improve upon his Japanese models, with the result that, whilst we may have a little less of the "defect," we have scarcely any of the "qualities." It is ever thus when West attempts to copy East.