inch of their surface), and all in a violent
state of ague with their teeth for ever chattering,
and their bodies for ever shivering?
And as to the flint again, isn't it mashed and
mollified and troubled and soothed, exactly
as rags are in a paper-mill, until it is reduced
to a pap so fine that it contains no atom of
"grit" perceptible to the nicest taste ? And
as to the flint and the clay together, are they
not, after all this, mixed in the proportion of
five of clay to one of flint, and isn't the
compound—known as " slip "—run into oblong
troughs, where its superfluous moisture may
evaporate; and finally, isn't it slapped and
banged and beaten and patted and kneaded
and wedged and knocked about like butter,
until it becomes a beautiful grey dough, ready
for the potter's use?

In regard of the potter, popularly so called
(says the plate), you don't mean to say you
have forgotten that a workman called a
Thrower is the man under whose hand
this grey dough takes the shapes of the
simpler household vessels as quickly as the
eye can follow? You don't mean to say you
cannot call him up before you, sitting, with
his attendant woman, at his potter's wheel—
a disc about the size of a dinner plate,
revolving on two drums slowly or quickly as he
wills—who made you a complete breakfast
set for a bachelor, as a good-humoured little
off-hand joke ? You remember how he took
up as much dough as he wanted, and, throwing
it on his wheel, in a moment fashioned it
into a teacup—caught up more clay and made
a saucer—a larger dab and whirled it into a
teapot—winked at a smaller dab and
converted it into the lid of the teapot, accurately
fitting by the measurement of his eye alone—
coaxed a middle-sized dab for two seconds,
broke it, turned it over at the rim, and made
a milkpot—laughed, and turned out a slop-
basin—coughed, and provided for the sugar?
Neither, I think, are you oblivious of the
newer mode of making various articles, but
especially basins, according to which improvement
a mould revolves instead of a disc? For
you must remember (says the plate) how you
saw the mould of a little basin spinning
round and round, and how the workman
smoothed and pressed a handful of dough upon
it, and how with an instrument called a profile
(a piece of wood, representing the profile
of a basin's foot) he cleverly scraped and
carved the ring which makes the base of any
such basin, and then took the basin off the lathe
like a doughey skull-cap, to be dried, and
afterwards (in what is called a green state) to
be put into a second lathe, there to be finished
and burnished with a steel burnisher ? And
as to moulding in general (says the plate), it
can't be necessary for me to remind you that
all ornamental articles, and indeed all articles
not quite circular, are made in moulds. For
you must remember how you saw the vegetable
dishes, for example, being made in
moulds; and how the handles of teacups, and
the spouts of teapots, and the feet of tureens,
and so forth, are all made in little separate
moulds, and are each stuck on to the body
corporate, of which it is destined to form a
part, with a stuff called " slag," as quickly as
you can recollect it. Further, you learnt—
you know you did—in the same visit, how the
beautiful sculptures in the delicate new
material called Parian, are all constructed in
moulds; how, into that material, animal
bones are ground up, because the phosphate of
lime contained in bones makes it translucent;
how everything is moulded, before going into
the fire, one-fourth larger than it is intended to
come out of the fire, because it shrinks in that
proportion in the intense heat; how, when
a figure shrinks unequally, it is spoiled—
emerging from the furnace a mis-shapen birth:
a big head and a little body, or a little head
and a big body, or a Quasimodo with long
arms and short legs, or a Miss Biffin with
neither legs nor arms worth mentioning!

And as to the Kilns, in which the firing
takes place, and in which some of the more
precious articles are burnt repeatedly, in
various stages of their process towards
completion,—as to the Kilns (says the plate,
warming with the recollection), if you don't
remember THEM with a horrible interest, what
did you ever go to Copeland's for? When
you stood inside of one of those inverted bowls
of a Pre-Adamite tobacco-pipe, looking up at
the blue sky through the open top far off, as
you might have looked up from a well, sunk
under the centre of the pavement of the
Pantheon at Rome, had you the least idea
where you were? And when you found
yourself surrounded, in that dome-shaped
cavern, by innumerable columns of an
unearthly order of architecture, supporting
nothing, and squeezed close together as if a
Pre-Adamite Samson had taken a vast Hall
in his arms and crushed it into the smallest
possible space, had you the least idea what
they were ? No (says the plate), of course
not! And when you found that each of those
pillars was a pile of ingeniously made vessels
of coarse clay—called Saggers—looking, when
separate, like raised-pies for the table of the
mighty Giant Blunderbore, and now all full of
various articles of pottery ranged in them
in baking order, the bottom of each vessel
serving for the cover of the one below, and
the whole Kiln rapidly filling with these,
tier upon tier, until the last workman should
have barely room to crawl out, before the
closing of the jagged aperture in the wall and
the kindling of the gradual fire; did you not
stand amazed to think that all the year round
these dread chambers are heating, white hot—
and cooling—and filling—and emptying—and
being bricked up—and broken open—humanly
speaking, for ever and ever ? To be sure you
did! And standing in one of those Kilns
nearly full, and seeing a free crow shoot
across the aperture a-top, and learning how
the fire would wax hotter and hotter by slow