“Porcelain by being pure is apt to break,”
Or at least to chip at the edges, and for every-day use pretty crockery is good enough unless a painstaking and cautious hand wields the dish-mop. The more covered with decoration (design and color being good) the prettier will be the effect of the ware when in use.
It is not at all necessary to have all the dishes upon the table of the same style and pattern. Harlequin sets can often be brought together so as to combine harmoniously, and pretty single pieces can be bought marvelously cheap. Amateur painted china is generally too costly for daily use, and when good should be treated with respect.
Plain silver is on the whole better for plain livers than that which is more elaborately ornamented, and absolutely plain solid silver forks and spoons can never be out of taste, and can easily be kept tidy with whiting. Electro-silicon and patent cleaners of that ilk injure silver and are ruinous to plated ware.
The beauty of silver and pottery depends first upon their form and adaptation to use; secondly, upon their decoration. Delicate chasings and thin repoussé work are naturally as appropriate to silver as good shapes and flat decoration are to earthen ware.
As to glass, there is a crystal craze at present, and “hob-nail” glass glitters on all tables. Miss Lucy Crane, in her lecture on “Form,” says (and I quote freely because her words are timely):
“As the beauty of glass consists in its transparency and lightness, and its capability of being twisted or blown or moulded into a multitude of delicate forms, it early occurred to the manufacturing mind that if made thick and solid, and cut into facets it would resemble crystal; and thus it has come to be a fixed idea that hard glitter is its most valuable quality, so it is made inches thick, and pounds heavy, to enhance its brilliancy; and being one of the most fragile of substances, it must be engraved with people’s crests and monograms as if it were intended to carry down the name of the family for generations to come! Being of its nature transparent, it must be rendered opaque of set intention by coloring matter, and then painted and gilded! Since at its strongest glass can never be anything but fragile, at least let it keep the beauty belonging to fragility; since it is naturally transparent, let the light be seen streaming through it, sometimes delicately tinted, sometimes iridescent, and, instead of being cut, let it be blown and twisted into the thousand delicate shapes to which it easily lends itself, and of which in the Venetian glass of a bygone day, and in its present revival, there are such delightful examples.”
I saw last evening a handful of flasks on their way to the laboratory, whose soap bubble effects were far more beautiful than all the cold glitter of all the “hob-nail” ware that Sandwich has ever produced.
In a boarding house it may economize labor to set the table over night, but it is pleasanter and more homelike to have it set fresh and clean with the morning light; beside, to have the dining table clear of an evening is often a great family convenience.