But in England, as elsewhere, the ‘ware of the Indies’ was coming more and more into favour, and its partial victory over foreign and native stoneware and pottery is, as we said above, closely connected with the increasing popularity of tea and coffee. Sack and claret were still served in bottles of Delft ware, and beer in stoneware jugs and tankards. A certain suspicion of effeminacy and degeneracy came to be associated both with tea and coffee, and with the ware in which they were served.[151] Even now, any ridicule to which the china-collector is exposed is generally associated with a teapot. We have in this chapter traced the early attempts made in Italy, as well as those in France and England, to imitate the porcelain of the Far East. We must now turn aside to Saxony, where, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, the problem was solved by the genius of a poor chemist’s assistant. We will then run rapidly through the many centres where hard-paste porcelain was made in Germany, before returning to the soft-paste wares of England and France. CHAPTER XV THE HARD-PASTE PORCELAIN OF GERMANY BÖTTGER AND THE PORCELAIN OF MEISSEN We have already more than once come across the famous Elector of Saxony, who found time, between his Polish wars and his innumerable amours, to bring together the nucleus, at least, of more than one of the great collections that have since his time attracted visitors to Dresden. In the historical collections of the Johanneum and in the Grüne Gewölbe, we find his name associated with many things of great beauty--arms and armour, silver plate and jewellery; but still, even after making every allowance for the strange taste of the time, the general impression of the man which we get from the objects brought together by him is not exactly that of a refined amateur. In fact, the German phase of the school that had its origin in the Rome of Bernini and in the Versailles of Louis XIV. found in the court of Augustus the Strong its true home. Nowhere else can we find more characteristic examples of that mixture of pomposity and childishness, that absence of all feeling for purity of line, which distinguishes the German ‘rococo,’ than in these collections and in the buildings that hold them. Now, it was under the direct patronage of this prince that the manufacture of porcelain was first established in Europe, and what we may call the taint of its original home has hung about the ware ever since. Of the porcelain of Europe as a whole--and this is especially true of the earlier and more interesting period--we may say that it belongs to the rococo school, tempered now and again by a more or less ill-understood imitation of Chinese and Japanese shapes and designs.