Page 42 - Chinese Porcelain Vol I, Galland

CHINESE PORCELAIN.
i 4
consist principally of odes and songs of moral and didactic,
and of sentimental and descriptive pieces." The ceramic
artist made his selection to suit his customers ; for the general
no doubt
public, taking what was most in fashion at the time,
and when pictorial art failed to convey the moral or sentiment,
the verse itself was copied on the porcelain. It was in this
way the fraud of the small bottles found in Egyptian tombs,
from not less than 1800 B.C., was discovered, Chinese
dating
scholars the thereon, in the grass
recognizing inscriptions
character, as quotations from poems of the eighth, ninth, and
later centuries of our era.

ROMANCES AND NOVELS.
Sir John Davis remarks : " Chinese works of fiction in the
shape of moral tales, novels, and romances, which, by the aid
of the art of so early invented, have become
printing, altogether
innumerable. Among them, however, some have of course
grown more famous and popular than others, and a very few
are ranked under the title of Tsae-tsze, or ' works of genius.'
They are perhaps the best sources to which we can address our-
selves in order to obtain a knowledge of the everyday habits
of the of the Chinese novels and romances
people. Many
which were written in the fifteenth of our era, and
century
some much earlier than that elate, would contrast very advan-
tageously, either as literary compositions, or as pictures of
with their of The Chinese
society, contemporaries Europe.
at that were the of civilization which
period long past stage
gives birth only to apologues or extravagant fictions, and could
relish of actual life and of situa-
representations complicated
tions into which men are thrown the contests of interest
by
and of in an artificial state of We therefore
passion things."
see the Chinese artist had a wide field, in this branch
very
alone, of the literature of his country, from which to choose
subjects suitable to his brush.