The general impression, we may finally say, given by a somewhat close inspection of the porcelain at Hampton Court, confirms the little we know of the date of its origin. It represents a period anterior to the great renaissance at King-te-chen at the end of the seventeenth century, but only just anterior to that time, and it is the absence of the finer and more brilliant wares made subsequently to this renaissance, examples of which we are accustomed to see in our modern collections, that gives a certain air of poverty to this porcelain collected by our ancestors. In some of the palaces and castles of Germany may still be seen collections of china made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, crowded together in the porcelain cabinet. Of these the best known, perhaps, is that at the ‘Favorite,’ near Baden, but there are others in the castle of the Waldstein family at Dux in Bohemia, and in Hungary in the castle of Prince Esterhazy. Many of these collections have remained unaltered since the time when they were first brought together, and it is in this fact that their principal interest lies. These china-cabinets are, of course, all eclipsed by the vast collection brought together, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and (at intervals) King of Poland. But this collection has undergone many vicissitudes since the time when it was first established in the handsome palace in the Neustadt at Dresden. It escaped, indeed, with little damage from the Prussian cannons during the Seven Years’ War; at the end of the century, however, it was removed to a gloomy basement, but so carelessly was this done that we hear of whole chests packed with broken fragments. In this ill-arranged and dark room the collection remained for nearly a century, until at last it has found a home in the well-lit galleries of the Johanneum. Here it is now seen to full advantage, thanks to an arrangement which combines historical sequence with a regard to general effect.