We illustrate ([p. 391]) two later figures, The Fishwife and Mother Goose. Both are well modelled, and were evidently intended to meet the popular taste. The days of gods and goddesses were over, and figures and groups begin to grow commonplace. In Mother Goose the nursery rhyme is substituted for the mythology of the Greeks.
Among other names found on these later figures are Lakin and Poole, Dale (mark usually impressed I. Dale Burslem), and Edge and Grocott, who made figures of boys partly draped holding baskets of flowers. It is possible that they made the two outside figures of Flower Boys (illustrated [p. 387]).
There is to lovers of the ultra-aesthetic something which appears to be trivial and insipid in this peasant pottery of the later date. But in spite of its defects, it holds, to those who read between the lines and can add that necessary touch of human interest to their collecting, a charm on account of its quaintness. Those who have sought these old cottage treasures high and low and secured from far-away habitations snug in the hills or lone huts on the wolds, or from the dim-lit cabins of fisher folk these relics of byegone days, read into their newly acquired possessions something of the life history in their old environment, lying perdu these many years, perched aloft on the high mantel or hidden in the cupboard recess silently listening to the old tales of the strange men and women who live apart from the hum of cities.
Chelsea we know, Derby we know, Bow we know, with their dainty china shepherdesses minding impossible sheep, and with gallants prinked out in all the colours of the humming-bird. These were the trifles in porcelain that my dear Lady Disdain in a waft of bergamot set apart in her glazed case by Sheraton. In the days of paint and patch and of the revels at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, virtuosos drowsily passed comment on my lady's latest acquisition just to please her passing whim and wean her from the vapours.
These earthenware figures "in homespun hose and russet brown" suggest the old world nooks of other days. Give Chelsea and Bow to the town. This homely art of Staffordshire became English after all. It was found in thatched cottages "with breath of thyme and bees that hum." These boscage shepherds and shepherdesses, these rustic musicians, lusty post-boys, and the family of Toby Philpots, found kinship in the miller and the farmer, the herdsman and the milkmaid, the gamekeeper and the woodman, the ostler and the waggoner—simple, kind-hearted folk, the children of nature uncloyed by the subtleties of art. Red-cheeked lasses and wrinkled crook-backed old dames, mother and daughter and granddaughter, toilers and sufferers, who chose the warm west window seat in the sun and the ingle nook by the fireside—these were the whilom owners of the old Staffordshire figures. Somehow, nor is the fancy a foolish one, one likes to associate these diminutive figures with the old gardens of England set in sweet places where one
"Can watch the sunlight fall
Athwart the ivied orchard wall;
Or pause to catch the cuckoo's call
Beyond the beeches."