It is important to remember the distinction between 'pottery' and 'porcelain:' the porcelain is clay purified by the fire, whereas pottery leaves the oven as it entered it--clay. The purification of the ware is really an illustration of the process which sustains the artistic inspiration of the work. The gross, the vulgar, the mean are eliminated; a standard of beauty is set up, and to it every article must conform. It is to this ideal, sustained by a long succession of artists through a century and a half, that Worcester owes its world-wide reputation as the birthplace of some of the loveliest porcelain ever burnt in a kiln. [Illustration: Chinese Porcelain Vase.] [Illustration] CHAPTER III. THE SEWING-MACHINE. Thomas Saint--Thimonnier--Hunt--Elias Howe--Wilson--Morey--Singer. Although the sewing-machine has not put an end to the slavery of the needle, and although 'The Song of the Shirt' may be heard to the accompaniment of its click and whirr, just as it was to the 'stitch, stitch' of Tom Hood's time, yet has it unquestionably come as a boon and a blessing to man--and woman. Its name now is legion, and it has had so many inventors and improvers that the present generation is fast losing sight of its original benefactors. Indeed, we take the sewing-machine to-day as an accomplished fact so familiar as to be commonplace. And yet that fact is a product of as moving a history as any in the story of human invention. It is the growth of the last half-century, prior to which the real sewing-machine was the heavy-eyed, if not tireless, needlewoman, whose flying fingers seemed ever in vain pursuit of the flying hours. Needlework is as old as human history, for we may see the beginnings of it in the aprons of fig-leaves which Mother Eve sewed. What instrument she used we know not, but we do know from Moses that needles were in use when the tabernacle was built. Yet, strange to say, it was not until the middle of last century that any one tried to supersede manual labour in the matter of stitching. It is said that a German tailor, named Charles Frederick Weisenthal, was the first to attempt it, but for hand-embroidery only--with a double-pointed needle, eyed in the middle. This was in 1755, and fifty years later, one John Duncan, a Glasgow machinist, worked out Weisenthal's idea into a genuine embroidering machine, which really held the germ of the idea of the 'loop-stitch.' But neither of these was a sewing-machine, and before Duncan's invention some one else had been seized with another idea.