point in the workshops of Josiah Wedgwood,
would be to write the history of civilisation;
and this not only because it is a useful as
well as a fine art, but because it has, as it were,
"fossilized" a series of long-buried facts for
our instruction—a series so gradual, so wonderful,
so rich in information, and so illustrative of
the progress of the human race, that it can be
compared to nothing more justly than to that
record of development which, in geology, begins
with the zoophite, and results in man.

The time is not yet come for this gigantic
task. The materials are not yet collected. But
they have long been in process of collection in
many fields of research, and by many workers.
The names of Brongniart, Pesaro, Dr. Birch,
Joseph Marryat, and Gustav Klemm, are famous
as pioneers in this branch of art-literature; and
surely none among these has approached his
task in a more earnest spirit, or contributed
more patient, and even precious labour of its
kind, than Miss Meteyard in her interesting
history of the life and products of our greatest
English potter.

Those who remember Miss Meteyard in her
first writings, will not have forgotten how every
little tale that fell from her pen in those early
times found its key-note in her advocacy of art-
manufacture. That taste was not necessarily
inseparable from cheapness; that the simplest
objects of household use might be graceful in
form, and harmonious in colour, without being,
therefore, less suitable to their original purposes;
in short, that there should be a soul of beauty
in things common, has been Miss Meteyard's
literary and artistic creed from the beginning of
her career as a writer of fiction and feuilleton.

Remembering this to be the case, we are not
surprised to learn from her preface to the Life of
Wedgwood that she has had this work in view
for fifteen years. Some of her earliest
recollections, she says, were of the potteries;
some of her earliest possessions, specimens of
toy-ware from the famous Burslem works.
Since then, her tastes, her surroundings, her
studies, have all inclined in the same direction.
She appears, from her minute and comprehensive
account of the earths, glazes, and processes
employed by Wedgwood and his contemporaries,
to be herself possessed of no small share of
sound chemical knowledge. She is acquainted
with the whole art and mystery of pottery.
She is imbued with just that amount of hero-
worship proper to a biographer. She has had
access to a virgin mine of letters, documents,
note-books, and day-books of every description,
now in the possession of Josiah Wedgwood's
descendants and successors; and she has enriched
her first volume with a brief history of early
British pottery, which is remarkable for being
the only essay on that subject yet brought
before the public.

Taking these facts at their value, and having
read every line of Miss Meteyard's present
volume from its first to its five-hundred-and-
fourth page, we need hardly state our conviction
that the subject could in no wise have fallen into
more congenial hands; or have been produced
in a manner more costly and complete.

The art of pottery appears to have been
practised in Britain before the Roman era. Specimens
of Celtic urns are found scattered on the
floors of subterraneous hut circles, in caves, under
the moors in the north and west of England,
imbedded in the chalk formations of Kent, and
buried along the course of ancient trackways.
It is generally dark coloured, being formed of
the superficial, ferruginous clays; is moulded
by hand, and sometimes ornamented with a zig-
zag pattern, rudely scratched in by means of a
pointed stick or flint. Mr. Tylor, in his
admirable book on the history of mankind,
observes that much of this early British ware was
modelled in baskets of willow, which, being
burned off when the clay was sufficiently fired,
left an indented pattern on the surface—a fact
which seems to have escaped Miss Meteyard's
observation. At this time, each family is
supposed to have moulded its own pottery, as the
Indian families carve their own bowls; and it
was not till the period of the Roman conquest
that the art was cultivated by means of
associated labour. Extensive potteries then sprang
up throughout Roman Britain; and the kilns on
the banks of the Nen, the Medway, and the
Severn, supplied the foreign legionary with those
tiles, wall ornaments, and vessels of use and
ceremony, to which he was accustomed in his
home beside the Tiber.

From this time, and for so long as the Roman
rule endured in Britain, the art appears not only
to have flourished, but to have been carried to
a high degree of perfection; especially in the
neighbourhood of Lincoln, where the famous
Castor pottery was made; but with the Saxon
domination it is seen to degenerate in form,
colour, and fabric. The great potteries fell into
disuse, and the tilewright's craft became local,
like that of the blacksmith or the carpenter. The
village potter of the Saxon period made coarse
dishes and porringers for the thane and the abbot,
while the table of the ceorl was furnished with
beechen bowl and platter. The advent of the
Normans, who affected more domestic splendour
than the Saxons, gave, however, some slight
encouragement to the fast-failing staple of
Staffordshire and Kent. Tiles for ecclesiastical
purposes, and pitchers decorated with the
heraldic insignia of noble families, were now called
into requisition; and the potter's art benefited
in a partial degree by that spirit of emulation
that came in with the great Conquest, and
animated the workshops of the middle ages.

The skill of the English potter was, however,
for four or five centuries, almost exclusively
displayed in the manufacture of decorative tiles;
and this because the taste of the age left no
other path open to his genius. The buffets of
the nobles were supplied with the costly
imported wares of Italy and Flanders; while
wooden ware, from its cheapness and durability,
was universally employed for household
purposes. Caliban, it will be remembered, rejoiced
that he should "scrape trencher" for Prospero