184 THE WEDGWOODS. 



only a few tons, which were carried on the backs of mules, 

 from a great distance, to the port of Charlestown, in South 

 Carolina. No clay equal to this in purity has been met with 

 in England, nor perhaps in Eurojpe, except in a few lead mines 

 about Brassington, in Derbyshire, and there only in such 

 small quantities that it cannot be made the basis of a manu- 

 factory. In 1792 Colonel Ironsides sent him a specimen of 

 the brown matrix, from the East, which the colonel wrote to 

 be the very clay itself, but herein was set right by Mr. W. 

 in a letter to him. Mr. Wedgwood was well acquainted with 

 the Brassington clay in 1765, and then procured small 

 quantities of it for experiment.* 



" By numbering and registering the results of the experi- 

 ments he was constantly making, he could take up the ideas 

 they furnished at any distant time when occasion required, 

 and by these means he saw in the drawers of his cabinet the 

 employment of his future life, and perhaps of that of his 

 successor. He was thus enabled to keep up the spirit and 

 attraction of his works by a succession of novelties, and his 

 manufactory appeared in a progressive course of improve- 

 ment. His inventions as they rose had the good fortune to 

 be countenanced by the fashionable world, which secured 

 them a favourable reception with the bulk of mankind. His 

 contemporaries, in the pottery (in every instance but one that 

 will be pointed out) soon adopted them, and they became 

 general articles of commerce and public benefit. 



" * That the efficacy of causes may have their due influence/ 

 we have known him ever forward to declare that it was alone 

 owing to the munificent protection of his sovereign, and the 

 liberal encouragement of the nobility and gentry of these 

 kingdoms, that he was able to risk the expense of these 

 continual improvements, unparalleled, we believe, in the 

 history of any similar manufactory in Europe. 



"Thus honoured and thus prosperous in his humble pot- 



* The importance of this material was evidently known to Wedgwood's 

 contemporary, Duesbury, of the Derby china works, who rented some lead 

 mines at the place. 



