Modern plate is a sore point with those who have learnt what plate can and ought to be, by collecting old plate.

It is extraordinary how ambitious and obtrusive, how elaborate and varied, are the vast pieces exhibited by the great silversmiths, and chiefly manufactured for purposes of presentation: how skilful and minute is sometimes the workmanship - and how weak, how coarse, how vulgar, how innocent of all anatomical and botanical knowledge, is the design!

When an English workman chooses to reproduce a piece of old or Oriental plate of fine design, how perfectly can he do it - he has appliances such as man never had before, and he is paid nobiy, If designs were furnished to him by Leighton or Watts, for his candelabra, his plateaux or his clocks, he could carry them out with surpassing skill. But what do we see? ceaseless attempts of the unknown designer to run before he can walk: feverish efforts to be 'showy.' He will design a grove of palm-trees without taking the trouble to spend a day at Kew and observe the real form of a palm - he will surround it with cavalcades of camels and elephants without a bone in their bodies, and frequently standing at an impossible angle: he will niggle over the ground with pebbles and footmarks not one of which is beyond criticism, set the whole abomination with looking-glass, and sell it to the Lord Mayor, firmly believing, in the words of his catalogue, that it is a 'superb masterpiece of magnificent design.'

And the mermaids! and the cupids! and the nymphs! with all their muscles wrongly placed: their throats mere cylinders of shapeless metal bent to fit the head - which is often grotesquely too small; their arms and legs smooth and tapering, without action or the possibility of action, minus muscles. The hands, supposed to be grasping something which they do not touch; the boneless fingers like elastic caterpillars, each one nearly S-shaped; the feet too small to support such length of frame; the ears put in the wrong place; the ankles bent in attitudes quite opposed to the power of the joint - the whole torso, which the modellers delight in exposing, as hideously out of drawing as frame can be, and the folds of crowded drapery ' done out of their heads.'

There are no doubt sins to be avoided in old sculpture. The ancients, though conscientious, were not impeccable. The Venus de Medici with fingers too taper to admit of an internal bone, may be our precedent for shapeless extremities: her tortoise-like cranium may excuse a similar modern blot. Still we know that her hands and head are not Greek. Many a mediaeval Madonna is frameless beneath her massy folds, and great liberties have been taken with her muscles. Raphael himself was partial to a leg bending inward at the knee, and outward at the ankle as (I believe) no leg, not even an acrobat's, can humanly bend. But we will not emulate the sins, only the virtues, of dead genius; and it would cost trade capitalists very little extra to get a good design from a Royal Academician and reproduce it frequently; Marochetti with all his faults was surely superior to the common English designer.

One of the merits of David, in the time of the Empire, was to check that inane style of modelling which during the decadence of taste under Louis XV. had begun to be tolerated, and to encourage something more robust and interesting. I have seen a scythed 'Time' surmounting an old brazen clock, whose limbs showed the discriminating pressure of instructed finger and thumb upon the yielding clay, the torso well understood, the head well-set, the limbs nervous, decided, and full of life; yet the design was rough, there were no signs of mean and niggling finish, which like a specious edifice built on faulty foundations betrays the want of knowledge and integrity beneath.

The Phaetonic horses of the same period, though drawn servilely from classic types, were strong, muscular, equine - there was some modelling in them. The modern clock or centrepiece has a horse like a sausage, a rider that does not fit his back, or a nymph cast flat on one side and soldered on in relief, so that the first glance confuses the eye with parts round and parts flat.

The abominations found in pieces of the utmost costliness and labour have no excuse. Our museums, our schools of art, our Botanic and Zoological Gardens, and books of incredible worth and cheapness, await a visit, a glance from our designers - but glance they will not, in the mental congestion of their dense ignorance and self-satisfaction; and the public ought to insist upon something better for their money.

What I said about the purchaser educating the workman to make good furniture holds doubly true in this higher department of design: for the material is more precious, and the cost is proportionately greater. I exhort the public to buy antiques, and not modern plate - for the education of their own eye, so that they may see the difference between them, and may have definite ground to go upon in criticising modern work, and be independent of the salesman's salaried 'opinion.'

It is too melancholy for those who know something about old plate to sit all dinner-time opposite some horrible Presentation piece, only fit for the smelting-pot, whither may the burglar soon despatch it! watching the bad soldering, the coarse castings of rocks and goddesses, the industrious frosting which strives to divert the eye from ill-modelled and balanced figures, with limbs of unequal length, extremities of unequal size.

Where are the neat finish, the well-hammered surfaces, the careful graving, the delicate repousses patterns which make old plate, however plain, full of interest? The plate of early Georgian times, simple as the patterns often were, ugly sometimes, compares with Victorian illimitably to the latter's disadvantage. The genuine old plate of Stuart times, far rarer, and far more beautiful, shouts our reproof still loudlier. Who can forget the lovely dish and ewer of Renascence work, and that still older and finer Tudor cup, belonging to St. John's College, Cambridge? Who can forget that Briot, Luca Delia Robbia, Benvenuto Cellini, Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, Pollajuolo, Ghirlandajo, and La Francia - with other names as great - were at one time working goldsmiths: that Jan van Eyck and Holbein designed continually for plate, if they did not actually hammer it: and that even in England plate used to be deemed so essentially the artist's business, that court-painters were indiscriminately described as 'goldsmith,' 'carver,' 'portrait-painter,' and 'embosser' to royalty, from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth? This we have repeated authority for.