TEA-SERVICES.--It is possible there are persons who believe that tea has always been known, and that the lovely tea-services out of which, we sometimes drink it have existed from the time of Noah and the Deluge; not so.
Pepys, in his "Diary," speaks of it in 1661 as "a China drink of which I had never drunk before." And at that time it sold in England at fifty or sixty shillings a pound--an enormous price.
Tea and coffee pots were first brought to Holland from China, and do not appear earlier than about 1700; so that those which came over in the Mayflower and the Half-Moon and the Ark must have been made by Elder Brewster and Henry Hudson and Leonard Calvert from the "depths of their moral consciousness."
Tea, we must remember, was not drunk in England earlier than about 1660, and then but rarely; and coffee was introduced into England about 1637.
Teapots have from time to time been a collector's fancy, and persons have again and again got together four or five hundred, of all patterns and decorations. Nothing would be more pleasing in this way at the afternoon tea, when every guest should have each his own service, and every one beautiful.
That the use of delft-ware for ornament throughout Holland was great is evident from the number of decorated plates and vases, many of large size, and many showing a careful style of painting; these are now constantly coming from that country, and they are not counterfeits. Most of them certainly are rudely but effectively painted, and are very decorative. Upon a farm, not far from Amsterdam, the cows during the summer season being upon the pastures, I found the stables carefully cleansed and whitewashed, and the stalls and walls hung with large and gayly-painted plates and plaques; and some pieces of brass-work were added to impart a desired brilliancy.
Nearly every house, great and small, in the palmy days of Holland had more or less decorative delft-ware hung upon its walls and placed upon its mantel-pieces; many of these have been carefully treasured up, and they are the stores from which the world now makes its drafts.
A favorite decoration was a garniture for the mantel-shelf, consisting of three covered and two uncovered vases, such as are seen in Fig. 89. They are often painted in blue alone, which for a long time was the prevailing color, and which sometimes nearly equaled the best blues of China. The ones here figured are of an excellent blue, and show a religious subject--the Virgin, Child, and St. John.