232 THE WEDGWOODS. 



great success, and was soon enabled to enter the market 

 with English-made hard-paste china, composed of native 

 materials alone. The early examples are, as is natural to 

 expect, very coarse, rough, and* inferior, but they evidence, 

 nevertheless, considerable skill in mixing, though not so 

 much, perhaps, in firing. And they are also remarkable 

 for their clumsiness, as well as for their bad colour, their 

 uneven glazing, and their being almost invariably disfigured 

 by fire cracks, usually at the bottom. 



As on the earliest productions of all the old china works, 

 the decorations on the Plymouth examples are invariably 

 blue; the blue at first being of a heavy, dull, blackish 



shade, but gradually improving, until, on some specimens 

 which I have seen, it had attained a clear brilliance. Cook- 

 worthy, being an experienced chemist, paid considerable atten- 

 tion to the producing of a good blue, and was the first who 

 succeeded in this country in manufacturing cobalt blue 

 direct from the ore. Before this time the colour was pre- 



