Therefore I believe the “art of living” is first and foremost; to know how to make this life comfortable and beautiful is all-important. Yet there is not a teacher of this great art in all the land, although “professors” are legion.
We may well ask, when we go to a house: “What have they there to tell us—what to show us? What have they collected to interest, to please, to instruct?”
If a person has only many bonds bearing coupons locked up in his safe—delightful as the fact may be to him—what pleasure or satisfaction is that to us?
But if in that house are gathered all the interesting examples of any growth of Nature or of Art, what a pleasure to go there!—they may be beetles, or butterflies, or stones, or shells, or silvers, or porcelains. I thank God that here is a man who can and does collect—one who does care for something which I too care for.
I wish, therefore, that every young man and young woman would get a hobby early in life to which he or she can at any time devote some spare time and spare money. Ennui, the demon who afflicts the idle, is thus exorcised, and vice loses its charming power.
The collector, too, does not waste his money. There is not a collection of pictures or of minerals, of birds or of butterflies, of chinas or of books, of armor or of gems, of laces or of tapestries, if made with ordinary care and knowledge, but is worth more—often ten times or fifty times more—than it has cost. Even in a pecuniary way, therefore, the hobby is productive; and the collection is not only as interesting, but it is as good as gold.
Our Collections.—Of collections of porcelain and pottery one must of course look for great exhibitions to the museums of Europe—such as the Kensington Museum, in London; the Cluny, in Paris; the Green Vaults, in Dresden; the Oriental, at Leyden—and to private collections, such as the Rothschilds have made at London and at Paris, to Lady Schreiber’s, and many more, in England.
What are accessible to us are the private collections of some of our own people.
In New York, Mr. William C. Prime’s collection is quite large, numbering some four thousand pieces. It is particularly devoted to the porcelains of Europe, and is an excellent collection. In it are some four or five complete dinner-services of old Dresden and Sèvres porcelain, and many single pieces which rank high.
Mr. S. P. Avery’s collection of Oriental porcelains is the most complete we have, and is very rich in all the departments, especially the Chinese. His pieces of “celestial blue” number more than any other single collection in this country.