Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/556

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 S.VH. DEC 4,1020.

few years, and contained a surprising number of -plating firms. Birmingham was not a whit behind, =and, while perhaps its goods were slightly inferior as a whole to the productions of its rival, in Boulton the town possessed a consummate master and organizer of the craft. London, too, had uts tale of platers, though probably the majority were agents for the productions of the North and Midlands. That the export trade was of con- siderable dimension is proved by the catalogues the leading firms thought fit to issue, goodly catalogues with finely engraved plates listing wares of extra- ordinary variety and cheapness. Variety, indeed, was a feature of the industry. Manufacturers were ever on the alert to capture fresh models and sideas. Their products reflected all the contem- porary styles and schools ; and they had just attained the exuberance of the Victorian epoch, when the blow fell which killed the industry or rendered it a lost art. The blow was the invention, m ore accurately the practical application, of electro- plating. This was in 1840 or thereabouts. The new process was at once cheaper and more expedi- tious, and it had at least as many advantages. It lent itself to the same models and was hardly less durable. That it was likely to fall an easier prey to artistic degradation was no concern of the inventor. The decline of all honest handiwork was beginning.

The industry was peculiarly fortunate in the "time of its birth. It came to perfection just when all decorative arts in this country were at their zenith ; when the factory system as applied to ceramics, cabinet-making and silverwprk had not cut at the sroots of honest workmanship, when hand and eye were as yet in close alliance, and balance and proportion seemed instinctive in the craftsman. 'The manufacture of Sheffield Plate is not a lost -art ; rather it is an art no longer practised, because commercially it is uneconomical. Cheapness is what matters to-day.

In taking leave of the book one or two small criticisms suggest themselves. The technical in- troduction might be clearer with advantage. Precise statements of the essential differences between the various methods of plating might be given in a future edition. Again, we find it nowhere stated that Bolsover plated his products after he had fashioned them, and that Hancock was the first to iuse silver and copper in the ingot and to make possible thereby the production of larger articles. But the most serious criticism we have to offer -concerns the production of the book. In a book where the plates form an indispensable part of the whole they should be properly guarded, or at least sewn in with the sheets. In the book before us they have been " tipped in " with paste and must in no short time part company with the letterpress.

A. Day- Book of Benjamin Disraeli. Chosen by Mrs. Henry Head. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 3s. 6d. net.)

'THE curious wit and wisdom peculiar to Disraeli raise the question as to who is the fairer judge, he who judges a thing from the inside or he who judges from the outside. This selection we find it an excellent selection brings home, even more vividly than do his books as wholes, the

-externality of Disraeli's position in regard to English society, the English understanding of

life, even English politics. What Mrs. Head has chosen for us are b"rief, brilliant descriptions of things and places ; analyses of character, mostly ironical, invariably keen and clear ; paradoxes on ethical questions ; shrewd judg- ments concerning motives and affairs, and sundry examples of Disraeli's attractive but penetrating cynicism. The whole has something of the effect one may observe in Japanese pictures of London : its truth cannot be generally gainsaid, but it is subtly altered from the same truth as it normally appears to the Englishman.

To the writer of these sentences it seems likely that Disraeli's judgments on nineteenth- century England will command more and more respect, and this not only because, in his quality of a genius, he pierces through the particular to the universal, but also by reason of his quality as an alien, and an Oriental alien. He can thereby relate the English people and the English history of his day to the general history and contemporary life and mentality of the world outside England as no other man then living c?n. A knowledge of hiss inner mind is more necessary, from this point of view, than an acquaintance with his public policy. Like all writers in whom wit is a predominant feature he may be learnt in no inconsiderable degree by extracts and obiter dicta, and we should therefore value this book of selections somewhat more highly than most compilations of the kind.

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E. F. S. D. " Out of the stress (strain) of the doing." A writer at 11 S. x. 336 referred these lines to The Sunday at Home for May, 1910, but gave no author's name. MR. JOHN B. WAINE- WRIGHT, who at ante p. 338, reminded us of this, has heard them attributed to an American writer named Jay.