Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

We made Worcester what amends we could for refusing to stop the night in / her picturesque old inn, so powerfully smelling of stable, by going an / afternoon from Malvern to see her fabric of the Royal Worcester ware / which some people may think she is named for. Really, however, she was / called Wygraster, Wyrcester Wearcester, Wureter, and Hooster, long / before porcelain was heard of. In times quite prehistoric the Cornuvíí / dwelt there in dug-outs, or huts, of "wottle-and-dab," the dab being / probably the clay now used in the Royal Worcester ware. In a more / advanced period, she was plundered and burned by the Danes, and had a / mint of her own nearly a thousand years before we paid her our second / visit. But this detail, of which, with many others, we were ignorant, / could not keep us from going to the works, and spending a long, / exhausting, and edifying afternoon amidst the potteries, ateliers and / ovens. The worst of such things is you are so genuinely interested that / you think you ought to be much more so, and you put on such an intensity / of curiosity and express such a transport of gratitude for each new fact / that you come away gasping. I for my part, was prostrated at the very / outset by something that I dare say everybody else knows -- namely, that / to have a small teacup of china you must put into the oven a hulking / bowl of clay, which will shrink in baking to the proper dimensions, and / that the reduction through the loss of moisture must be calculated with / mathematical precision.

With difficulty I then followed our intelligent / guide through every part of the wonderful establishment: from the places / where the clays were being mixed and kneaded; where the forms were being / turned and moulded; where the dried pieces were being painted and / decorated in the colors which were to come to life in the furnaces / wholly different colors from those laid on by the artists; from the / delicate smoothing and polishing, to the final display by sample, in the / pretty show-room where one might satisfy the most economical / thankfulness by the purchase of a souvenir. The museum of the works, / where the history of the local keramics is told in the gradual / perfectioning of the product through more than a hundred and fifty / years, and where copies of its _chefs-d'œuvre_ are assembled in dazzling / variety, is most worthy to be seen; but I would counsel greater leisure / than ours to make it the occasion of a second visit. By the time you / reach it after going through the other departments, you feel like the / huge earthen shape which has come out, after the different processes, a / tiny demi-tasse. You are very finished, but you are desiccated to the / last attenuation, and a touch would shiver you to atoms.

It could not have been after we visited the Royal Porcelain Works that / we saw the noble Cathedral of Worcester; it must have been before, for / otherwise there would not have been enough left of us for the joy in it / of which my mind bears record still. The riches of the place can / scarcely be intimated, much less catalogued, and perhaps it was / fortunate for us that / the Norman crypt, with all its dim associations, was much abandoned to / the steam-boilers which furnish the inspiration, or at least, the power, / of the great organ. Though the verger, a man of up-to-date intelligence, / was proud of those boilers and their bulk, we complained of them to each / other, with the eager grudge of travellers; and I suppose we would / rather have had their room given to monuments of Bishop Gauden, who / wrote Charles I. 's _Eikon Basilike_, or of Mrs. Digby by the ever-divine / Chantrey, or masterpieces of Roubillac, or effigies of King John and / Prince Arthur, or tablets to the wife of Isaac Walton, with epitaphs by / the angler himself, such as Baedeker and the other guide-bookers say the / cathedral overhead abounds in. We learned too late for emotion that / Henry II. and his queen were crowned in the cathedral, and that the / poor, bad John was buried there at his own request. "The organ is / decorated in arabesque and has five manuals and sixty-two stops," yet we / thought it might have got on with fewer boilers in the crypt. Not that / we had time or thought for full pleasure in the rest of the cathedral.

I remember indeed the beautiful roof of one long unbroken level; but what / remains to me of the exquisite "Perp. Cloisters, entered from the S. / aisle of the nave"? I will own to my shame that we failed even to see / the marriage contract of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, in the / diocesan registrar's office, just within the cathedral gateway. Did we / so much know that it existed there? Who can say? We saw quite as little / that portion of the skin of the Dane who was flayed alive for looting / the cathedral, and is now represented by a remnant of his cuticle in the / chapter-house.