JOS1AH ATTACKED BY SMALL-POX. 103 



but in the wonderful ways of Providence, that disease, which 

 came to him as a twofold scourge, was probably the occa- 

 sion 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 some- 

 thing 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 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 bed-room, and an oracle 

 of his own inquiring, searching, meditative, fruitful mind. 



" 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 would be far from my wish to destroy, or to entrench, 

 even in the slightest degree, on the true poetry of this 

 relation; but as its sentiment cannot be altered, or its 

 beauty impaired, by correcting one of the statements, I do 

 not hesitate to say, what I have every reason for believing 

 to be the case, that the amputation of the leg was not alto- 

 gether the result of the small-pox, which had produced a 

 disorder and weakness in that limb, but of an accident ; and 

 that it did not take place during the boyhood of the great 

 man, but at a much later period of his life. The boy had 

 genius and thought, energy and perseverance, in him, which 

 wanted not the bodily affliction to become developed, and to 

 bring them to active perfection. His mind was such as 



