highest cultivation in all its forms, this great nation has abundance. Of industry, skill, perseverance, mechanical contrivance, it has a yet larger stock, which overtops our narrow fence, and floods the world. The one great want is, to bring these two groups of qualities harmoniously together; and this was the peculiar excellence of Wedgwood; his excellence, peculiar in such a degree, as to give his name a place above every other, so far as I know, in the history of British industry; and remarkable, and entitled to fame, even in the history of the industry of the world.

23. We make our first introduction to Wedgwood about the year 1741, as the youngest of a family of thirteen children, and as put to earn his bread, at eleven years of age, in the trade of his father, and in the branch of a thrower. Then comes the well-known small-pox: the settling of the dregs of the disease in the lower part of the leg: and the amputation of the limb, rendering him lame for life. It is not often that we have such palpable occasion to record our obligations to the small-pox. But, in the wonderful ways of Providence, that disease, which came to him as a twofold scourge, was probably the occasion of his subsequent excellence. It prevented him from growing up to be the active vigorous English workman, possessed of all his limbs, and knowing right well the use of them; but it put him upon considering whether, as he could not be that, he might not be something else, and something greater. It sent his mind inwards; it drove him to meditate upon the laws and secrets of his art. The result was, that he arrived at a perception and a grasp of them which might, perhaps, have been envied, certainly have

* A very similar anecdote is told of Joseph Bramah by Mr. Smiles; Industrial Biography, p. 184.

been owned, by an Athenian potter. Relentless criticism has long since torn to pieces the old legend of King Numa, receiving in a cavern, from the Nymph Egeria, the laws that were to govern Rome. But no criticism can shake the record of that illness, and that mutilation of the boy Josiah Wedgwood, which made for him a cavern of his bedroom, and an oracle of his own inquiring, searching, meditative, fruitful mind.

24. From those early days of suffering, weary perhaps to him as they went by, but bright surely in the retrospect both to him and us, a mark seems at once to have been set upon his career. But those, who would dwell upon his history, have still to deplore that many of the materials are wanting. It is not creditable to his country or his art, that the Life of Wedgwood should still remain unwritten.* Here is a man, who, in the well-chosen words of his epitaph, "converted a rude and inconsiderable manufacture into an elegant art, and an important branch of national commerce." Here is a man, who, beginning as it were from zero, and unaided by the national or the royal gifts which were found necessary to uphold the glories of Sèvres, of Chelsea, and of Dresden, produced works truer, perhaps, to the inexorable laws of art, than the fine fabrics that proceeded from those establishments, and scarcely less attractive to the public taste of not England only, but the world.

25. Here, again, is a man, who found his business cooped up within a narrow valley by the want of even tolerable communications, and who, while he devoted his mind to the lifting that business from meanness, ugliness, and

* [It has since been written at large by Mrs. Meteyard; and in a more contracted form by Mr. Tewitt.-W. E. G., 1878.]

weakness, to the highest excellence of material and form, had surplus energy enough to take a leading part in great engineering works like the Grand Trunk Canal from the Mersey to the Trent. These works made the raw material of his industry abundant and cheap, supplied a vent for the manufactured article, and opened for it materially a way to what we may term its conquest of the outer world.

26. Lastly, here is a man who found his country dependent upon others for its supplies of all the finer earthenware, but who, by his single strength, reversed the inclination of the scales, and scattered thickly the productions of his factory over all the breadth of the continent of Europe. There has been placed in my hands, this very morning, a testimony to the extraordinary performance of Wedgwood in this respect, which is couched in such terms, that I might have scrupled to accept or quote them, had they been due to the partial pen of a countryman. But the witness is a contemporary Frenchman, M. Faujas Saint Fond; who, in his Travels in England, writes as follows respecting Wedgwood's ware :—

"Its excellent workmanship; its solidity; the advantage which it possesses of standing the action of the fire; its fine glaze, impenetrable to acids; the beauty, convenience, and variety of its forms, and its moderate price, have created a commerce so active, and so universal, that in travelling from Paris to St. Petersburg, from Amsterdam to the furthest point of Sweden, from Dunkirk to the southern extremity of France, one is served at every inn from English earthenware. The same fine article adorns the tables of Spain, Portugal, and Italy; it provides the cargoes of ships to the East Indies, the West Indies, and America."

27. Surely it is strange that the life of such a man

should, in this "nation of shopkeepers," yet at this date remain unwritten; and I have heard with much pleasure a rumour, which I trust is true, that such a gap in our literature is about to be filled up.

28. All that we know, however, of the life of Wedgwood seems to be eminently characteristic. We find the works of his earliest youth already beginning to impress a new character upon his trade: a character of what may be called precision and efficiency, combined with taste, and with the best basis of taste, a loving and docile following of nature. We find him beginning his partnerships when manhood was but just attained, first with Harrison, a fellow-workman, secondly with Whieldon; and the latter business, I believe, was carried on at the exact place where we are now assembled. But, as we might naturally expect in a case of a spirit so energetic and expansive, we learn that, in each of these cases, the bed did not give him room enough to lie on or to turn in; and in 1759, as soon as his articles with Whieldon expire, he escapes from this unequal yoking, and enters into business by himself. This, however, though a natural, was not a final stage. It was necessary that he, who was the soul, should also be the centre and the head: but it was further necessary that he should surround himself at all points with an efficient staff for a great, varied, and not merely reforming but creative work. Hence he associated himself with Mr. Richard Bentley as a partner; who is stated to have chiefly superintended the London business, but who has

*I learned at Burslem, after delivering this Address, with pleasure but without surprise, that Mr. Wedgwood either was the founder, or at the least took a leading part in the foundation, of the Horticultural Society of London.

credit for having supplied the information, necessary to enable the firm to enter so largely on the handling of classical designs. Hence he employed Mr. Chisholm as an experimental chemist, and other scientific men in the several departments of the business. Hence his connexion with Flaxman, which has redounded alike to the honour of the one and of the other.

29. It was once the fashion to say that Queen Elizabeth had by no means been proved to be a woman of extraordinary powers, but that she certainly had ministers of vast ability. And in like manner some might be tempted to suspect, when they have seen Wedgwood thus surrounded, that his merit lay chiefly in the choice of instruments and coadjutors, and that to them the main part of the praise is due.

30. What were the respective shares of Bentley and others in the great work of Wedgwood, is a question of interest, on which it may be hoped that we shall soon be more largely informed. It is plain that, in an enterprise so extended and diversified, there not only may, but must, have been, besides the head, various assistants, perhaps also various workmen, of merit sufficient to claim the honour of separate commemoration. As to the part which belongs to Flaxman, there is little difficulty: notwithstanding the distorting influence of fire, the works of that incomparable designer still in great part speak for themselves. To imitate Homer, Eschylus, or Dante, is scarcely a more arduous task than to imitate the artist by whom they were illustrated. Yet I, for one, cannot accept the doctrine of those, who would have us ascribe to Flaxman the whole merit of the character of Wedgwood's productions, considered as works of art.

31. And this for various reasons. First, from what we