176 



manufactured in the province of Euh-Keen, and sold under the name of 

 'seals from the Euh-Keen potteries;' but the best of them are spoken 

 of in Chinese books as very inferior to those made in former times." 



The concluding part of Eev. Dr. Legge's letter contains an ingenious 

 conjecture, which I must confess myself unable either to verify or dis - 

 prove. He says — " The question as to how these seals found their way 

 to Ireland will probably ever remain a problem not fully solved. The 

 above detail throws a little light on it. It was during the 'Ming' dy- 

 nasty that such articles came to be ' the rage ' in China, and it was at 

 the same time that European commerce with the Empire commenced ; 

 Queen Elizabeth sent an envoy to the Emperor in 1596. Some of the 

 early visitors from England and Ireland must have taken the seals back 

 with them from China. How they came to be sown over so large a 

 tract of Ireland we shall never be able to discover." 



The settled point, so far, appears to be, that these seals cannot be 

 older than the end of the fourteenth or commencement of the fifteenth 

 century; how much later than this era they came to Ireland we have 

 as yet no evidence. The antiquity of the seal inscriptions is of no 

 moment; seal writing, like " black letter," is a remnant of past times 

 which has not yet entirely disappeared ; indeed the Chinese, eminently 

 conservative in their ideas, still employ for their seals those extremely 

 ancient characters, which are well understood by the learned of that 

 land. At all events porcelain seals have turned up in Ireland from time 

 to time during about eighty years past; and even if we fancy that a hatful 

 was once imported by some savant anxious to puzzle posterity, and scat- 

 tered broadcast over the surface of the kingdom, still it seems he must 

 have been uncommonly diligent to deposit them in almost every county, 

 with perhaps such a preponderance of southern localities that we might 

 fancy their original owner had his habitation there. At all events, 

 almost half a hatful have been already picked up. The evidence, so 

 far, we must conclude, fails to establish any ancient Irish traffic 

 with the flowery land, and these seals were neither known to or imported 

 by "Phoenician or Milesian, or the plundering Norman peers." 



Mr. Kaye, of the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China, 

 deserves my best acknowledgments, in the first instance, for the interest 

 he took in these inquiries. Residing in Hong Kong, he made diligent 

 inquiries for any information that could be procured. He failed al- 

 together to get porcelain seals at that city ; and though he sent to 

 Canton, and had the shops searched, he could obtain none there but 

 specimens of recent soapstone seals. At last he learned that a gentle- 

 man had once got some of them, which he picked up at Macao. By his 

 exertions Eev. Dr. Legge was enlisted in carrying on the search ; and 

 to him I owe the successful results, not alone of getting me authentic 

 Chinese specimens exactly similar to our Irish ones, but also for the 

 satisfactory account he drew up of their history, and of which I have 

 so largely availed myself. I will append to these remarks the list that 

 is subjoined, of all the authentic " finds" of porcelain seals in Ireland, 

 so far as I can complete it : — 



