[77] I cannot find the exact date of the first publication of these letters. In the eighteenth century we find them generally quoted from Du Halde. [78] This is a passage made use of by Longfellow in those often-quoted lines beginning-- ‘A burning town, or seeming so, Three thousand furnaces that glow,’ etc. [79] If we are to understand by this ‘transparent pebble’ some form of arsenic, for it would seem that arsenic (and not tin as with us) is the base of the opaque white enamels of the Chinese, it is difficult to believe that so volatile a substance could be thus prepared. [80] For the use of steatite in English porcelain see chap. xxii. At Vinovo, in Piedmont, another magnesian mineral has been employed for the paste. [81] In the following summary I have kept to the Père D’Entrecolles’s words as far as possible, but with considerable abbreviations. [82] We must here think of the more sober _famille verte_ lantern at South Kensington, rather than of the magnificent specimen of pierced work in the Salting collection, which is of later date. [83] The unique bowl of Chinese porcelain illustrated in Du Sartel’s book, of which the outside is decorated in black and gold in imitation of the Limoges enamel of the renaissance, may have had some such origin. This piece, on which even the initials of the original French artist have been copied, was formerly in the Marquis collection, and is now to be seen in the Grandidier Gallery at the Louvre. [84] We have already alluded to this point, _à propos_ of a bowl in the British Museum; see p. 110 note. [85] This branch of the subject is fully worked out in chapter xvii. of Dr. Bushell’s work. [86] When compared with a similar collection of European wares, perhaps the most noticeable difference is the small number of vessels adapted to _pouring_. So much is this the case that when we find a spout or lip on a specimen of Chinese porcelain, the piece takes at once a somewhat exotic aspect, and we are reminded of the Arab _Ibraik_, or the European ewer. [87] It is a curious fact that London chemists now send out their pills in little glass bottles almost identical in shape and size with these Chinese yao-ping. [88] The word is used in a restricted sense as explained above. [89] We have far too often to fall back on names of French origin. Our colour-vocabulary in the case of the enamels and glazes of porcelain is a sadly poor one. [90] In the case of some monochrome ware the colour may have been painted on the raw paste or on the biscuit, and a colourless glaze then added; or again, as in the case of the coral red mentioned below, it may be painted like an enamel _over_ the glaze. [91] It must, however, be remembered that this carved lacquer itself is sometimes applied as a coating to porcelain in China.