gredients are then mixed together in proper proportions and kneaded into the required consistency, and then the clay is ready for the thrower. The art of moulding clay has become much more exact since the employment of plaster of Paris moulds. After the thrower, with the help of his wheel, has roughly shaped the clay into what is termed the "lining," it is taken off the wheel and put into a plaster of Paris cast, which in turn is placed upon the whirling wheel, and the "lining" is then deftly moulded to the exact shape. As plaster of Paris absorbs moisture quickly, the lining is soon firm enough| to be handled. It is then "turned" like ordinary wood or metal, and has handles, which have been moulded in plaster of Paris, fixed by the same clay. It was always a puzzle to our minds how the handles were induced, not only to stick on to the jugs and cups, but to bear the weights of the same cups and jugs when full of liquid. This, however, is explained when it is understood that in spite of being made separately, the handles and vessels to which they belong are practically one piece when burnt. The porcelain is then ready to be baked. For this it is packed in fireproof baking dishes called "seggars" and supported on every side by powdered calcined flint. These seggars are made to fit exactly one upon another, although they are of different sizes and depths, and they are arranged in columns side by side in the oven. The oven is then bricked up and eight fires are lighted and kept burning for fortyeight hours, night and day. The oven takes four days to cool and then the contents are unpacked and are ready for a variety of processes. Most of the China is glazed, an operation requiring care and skill. The articles are bathed in the liquid glaze a muddy-looking broth-and the greater part of the superfluous glaze shaken off. But it is impossible to free them perfectly; besides the fingers leave marks, which have to be removed after the glaze has been dried in a hot room. Women and girls are employed for this work. The ivory glaze is a delicate salmon pink before it is baked, the white a dark drab. After it is glazed, the pottery, for the second time, is packed in seggars and baked. After this the colored china is painted and baked again. The gold is also baked in. Few people know that the gilt on china is the purest gold that can be bought. It is ground with mercury and turpentine into a black-looking paint and applied with a fine camel's-hair pencil. Boys are trained for this work from fourteen years of age, it being nearly impossible for older people to acquire the accuracy of eye and hand necessary. It is a great drawback to the production of artistic pottery that the coloring is totally different in the paint, from the result after burning. For instance, gold paint is black before, and dull gold afterwards; the brightness is produced by polishing it with an agate. Other colors are obtained from metallic oxides: iron gives red, cobalt, blue, etc. A delightful room is given up to modelling the quaint figures of which the shepherds and shepherdesses, the treasured ornaments of the cottage mantlepiece, are the humble progenitors. The plaster moulds are filled with clay, the consistency of cream. When the plaster has absorbed sufficient moisture to leave a firm shell of the clay inside, the rest of the clay is poured out, leaving the inside hollow, the mould is then opened, the little ridges left on the figure where the mould joined is washed off with a camel's-hair pencil, and the figures are packed to bake. The most expensive specimen of Worcester porcelains, but not by any means the most beautiful, in our opinion, was an enamelled dish and ewer; the latter was only about ten inches high and the dish was of a corresponding size, and the price was £150. For SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 15 cents. The plash of waves upon a quiet beach; Amidst the clustered ivy, out of reach. And only this bitter-sweet comfort A sleepy twitter from some hidden nest From The Fortnightly Review. CZAR AND EMPEROR. BY KARL BLIND. Towards the end of this month the coronation of Nicholas II. will take place at Moscow-once, like Novgorod and Kieff in earlier times, the capital of Russia, before Peter the Great transported the seat of government to the town built by him, which bears his or the Apostle's name. The day fixed for the ceremony is the same which was chosen by the father and predecessor of the present czar for his own coronation. No doubt, when the expected event comes off, we shall hear again, as usual, that the imperial title was for the first time assumed in 1721, by Peter the Great, from whose reign even otherwise well-informed persons often date almost the real existence of Russia. That the title of emperor was first taken by the ambitious monarch who "opened a window for Russia towards Europe," and that it had never been borne, or claimed, before by Muscovite rulers, is a statement one can even find in the works of distinguished historians of various countries. It is, nevertheless, a wholly erroneous assertion. Seeing how general the prevailing, but mistaken, opinion is, we cannot wonder that Mr. Disraeli, in one of his speeches on the Royal Titles Bill, should have said, by way of reference to, and comparison with Russia: "Peter the Great, when he was emerging from his anomalous condition as a powerful sovereign, hardly recognized by his brother sovereigns, changed the style and title of his office from that of czar to emperor; and that adoption was acknowledged by England, and by England alone; and the ruler of Russia remained unrecognized by the great comity of nations." This passage, it will presently be shown, contains two errors. For, not only had the imperial title been used at one time by Muscovite princes long before Peter I.; but, whilst it was unrecognized and contested then by not a few other monarchs, it had been acknowledged, in the sixteenth century, by English kings and queens. Russia is often said to be a young nation; and that is another strange misstatement. Thus Mr. Gladstone, in an article containing a eulogy of Alexander II., once described Russia as "nationally young." It would be impossible to commit a greater historical error. A thousand years ago, the Russian Empire was founded by the Germanic Warangians: Swedes, Norwegians, Angles, and Goths; that is, Scandinavians and Teutons, under the leadership of Rurik (Roderick) about the time of Alfred the Great. It was they who welded the Finn, Slav, and Tatar tribes between the Finnish Gulf and the upper course of the Dnieper into a Russian Kingdom. This "Russian” name—another fact little remembered - originally signified, not the natives, but the conquering Germanic clan or race in the same way as the names of France, of Lombardy, of Andalusia, of Catalonia, and of England arose from the Teutonic Franks, the Longobards, the Vandals, the Goths and Alans, and the Angles. A young nation, therefore, Russia certainly is not, either historically speaking, or otherwise. In the course of her long and checkered history, a great many things have happened. She has had ups and downs of the most extraordinary kind. The Finnish, Slav, and Turko-Tatar tribes of the great plain first yielded to the conquest of the Northmen, who introduced a semifeudal rule, out of which gradually a rather Oriental despotism grew up. Then came the Mongol inroad of the Golden Horde, under which Russia lay bowed from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. During that long epoch of oppression she was almost shut off from contact with Europe. Through internal feuds, the Khanate finally broke down, when there rose, on its ruins, the Czardom of Muscovy. It continued to govern on the lines and with the state machinery of the Mongols. The few self-ruling communities in the North-such as Novgorod, the associate of the German Hansa, Pskoff, and Tver-which had flourished in the meanwhile, were destroyed by the czar with the help of Tatar mercenaries. Autocracy was then supreme throughout the land. When European travellers and ambassadors began once more to visit Russia after the collapse of the Tatar dominion, they drew a picture of the state of things which certainly does not warrant the idea of national youthfulness. Sigismund von Herberstein, who in 1516, soon after the withdrawal of the Golden Horde, went as ambassador of the German Empire to Russia, wrote in his "Rerum Moscovitarum Commentarii," published at Vienna in 1549, with great astonishment: The Grand Prince speaks, and everything is done; the life, the property, of the laymen and the clergy, of the nobles and the citizens, all depend on his supreme will. He knows of no contradiction, and everything appears in him just, as in God; for the Russians are convinced that the Grand Prince is the fulfiller of Heaven's decrees. "God and the Prince have willed it!" are the ordinary expressions among them. .. I do not know whether it is the character of the Russian nation which has formed such autocrats, or whether the autocrats have stamped this character upon the nation. With a degree of indignation, Herberstein reports that the czars were already seeking to assume the imperial title. In somewhat indifferent, or rather bad, Latin he says that, in writing to the emperor or the pope, the czar only calls himself “King and Lord of All Russia." If, however, letters from the Ruthene language, translated into Latin, are added, the Muscovite interpreters-Herberstein says-render the word "czar" by "imperator." "In this way," he observes, "the czar makes himself both a king and an emperor." An assertion cunningly set afloat at that time in Russia was, that the German emperor-the only ruler who then bore that title in Europe-had conferred the imperial dignity upon the czars. But nobody, Herberstein declares, will believe that the Emperor Maximilian and his grandsons had anything to do with the creation even of the royal title of the czars; a title which would have been an injury to the king of Poland, with whom his own (Herberstein's) august master Maximilian had lived in sincere friendship. It will thus be seen that even the minor royal title of the czars was in those days looked upon abroad as a kind of usurpation. Yet it was soon after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks that the rulers of Muscovy had begun to lay occasional claim even to the higher imperial title, in virtue-so it was given out among the Russiansof the marriage of Ivan I. Wassiljewitch with a princess of the house of Palæologus, the daughter of a brother of the last Byzantine emperor. This was a resumption, so to say, under a new plea, of even older ambitious designs. Already the earliest Russian monarchs-that is, some of the first successors of Rurik the Northman-had turned their thoughts very much towards Byzantium, or eastern Rome, and repeatedly endeavored, by warlike expeditions, to gain possession of it. They did so when both they and their Finnish and Slav subjects were yet heathens, whilst the Eastern Empire was governed by an orthodox imperator. In those days, the "Rhos" (Russians), as the Byzantine Greeks called the Scandinavian conquerors, declared that "Constantinople must become their | capital because the Greeks were mere women, and the Russians bloodmen." Afterwards, when a Russian grand prince was about to be converted to the orthodox Greek faith, his plea was, that Constantinople should become his residence "because it suits the dignity of the ruler of Russia to receive baptism in the capital of eastern Christendom. Under various pretexts, these attempts at conquest, in which certainly an imperial ambition was involved, were made, off and on, from the ninth to the middle of the eleventh century. They failed, however, repeatedly; and then came the terrible catastrophe of the Mongol irruption, facilitated by dynastic feuds among the rulers of the various Russian principalities. That second, Asiatic, conquest bowed the country under the yoke of the Khanate |