xii

'

PREFACE

See them, sir! ay that you can. They're in the loft above. For a gentleman it's a dirty place. 'Bill,' -and here the man called a lad from the rear of the shop-show the gentleman up the ladder-and take care, sir—the floor's uncommon rotten.'

'I followed the lad,' adds Mr. Mayer, 'up the ladder ; and there, sure enough, piled up in mounds, filthy with the accumulated dust of years, and with gaps in their ranks as they stood, which only showed too well the inroads which had been made upon them, even whilst they stood here.'

The first paper which Mr. Mayer drew from the huge pile was the Inventory of the Goods' taken in 1787 by Flaxman to Rome, and of which a reduced fac-simile is given in the Life of Wedgwood,' vol. ii. p. 506. One or more papers which followed proved equally interesting, though the light by which he could examine them was so dim.

Finding the richness of the prize,' continues Mr. Mayer, on which I had thus unexpectedly laid my hand, I determined, if possible, not to lose it. I quickly descended the ricketty ladder, and under the beforementioned plea of my interest in old writings and papers, I enquired of the owner if he would part with

them.'

'Right gladly, sir; they're bits o' things, and not much use to me, or to anybody I suspect.

On this being said no further time was lost. The great mass was weighed and sold at so much a hundred-weight. A number of large second-hand deal

boxes were readily procured in the neighbourhood, and when they were packed and their contents paid for, they were carted to the Railway-station, nor did Mr. Mayer lose sight of them till they were safe on their way to Liverpool.

Such is the history of these remarkable documents. In their integrity, as they originally stood in the old rooms of Etruria, they must have contained such materials for the history of a great industry as were perhaps never before collected together. As they now are, it is very evident that great gaps have been made in their number by the destroyer's hand. Invariably docketed, and made up sequently into bundles, the great blanks here and there without purpose or order, show that these lapses were the result of mere accidental position and not design. The earlier and some of the later have suffered most. From what remains, as in the case of a single modeller's bill for 1769, we may judge that, had these papers been preserved to us in their original integrity, we should undoubtedly possess larger evidence of Bacon's, Flaxman's, and others' early labours for the great potter. Still we must be thankful for what are left. For many years Mr. Mayer devoted all the leisure hours of his busy life to the selection and arrangement of these papers. The results of this labour are now cleaned and tastefully mounted; and of these, some thousands in number, I have made a general, as also a chronological, index. The larger part, however, still remain in chaos, though I have gone through them for the

purposes of this work; and I am not without the hope, should life be spared me, of eliminating a mass of rubbish, and assorting and cataloguing what remains. When this long task shall be accomplished, and they are thus fitted for their final resting-place in some Museum, I foresee that they will prove useful in many directions of literary work. For instance, in some future history of British Commerce, a history not written after the old types, but on some such plan and after such manner as Sir Erskine May's powerful and lucid Constitutional History,' the foreign letters will afford much general and useful information in relation to tariffs, freights, duties, convoys, and other analogous subjects.

Mr. Mayer concurs with me in all which appears in this volume; and in this respect it has likewise received the sanction of an eminent critic. I have suppressed everything which might be considered of a private nature, though, at the same time I do not hold with those who, to meet the purposes and feelings of the narrowest conventionalism, would rob personal records of every touch of nature and of truth. I could point out collections of letters-letters of eminent men-which have been utterly ruined by this expurgating process carried to excess. And for what? Truth,' says an old law maxim, 'fears nothing so much as to be concealed;' and truth in all literary matters serves the highest ends. We are all too prone to ignore the things which lie around us, and the events and commonplaces of daily life, whilst we busy ourselves with

But the

the past, or lose ourselves in the future. generations who come after us will pry into that to which we shut our eyes, and treasure that which we disregard. Every word and trait which we can preserve of men like Sydney Smith, S. T. Coleridge, Campbell, Sir James Mackintosh, and other of their contemporaries, will be as pleasant as precious to posterity; and could our forefathers have seen this preciousness of truth, this realism of fact, as we occasionally see it, what might not have been preserved of human histories dear to us? Could we recover some little fire-side conversations and incidents of our Shakespeare and Milton, would they not be worth all commentaries and criticisms? Moreover, the broadening out of human thought in all directions should lead us to see the truth, that simplicity of words and acts will be the result of a high civilisation; and that in a wider and wiser generalisation of human life, its duties and effects, convention and its littlenesses will no longer terrorize.

My little sketch of the old Shrewsbury doctors is drawn from life. I recollect them as distinctly as though they now stood before me, and their verbal portraiture will, I hope, please some few of their many admirers. One of my most vivid recollections of Dr. R. W. Darwin is that when, on an autumn afternoon, my father and I met him in his chaise in one of the valleys of the Longmynd or Stretton Hills. We were staying at the house of my father's friend, John Marston, Esq., of Fellhampton, and had been led to this spot by one of my father's hobbies-that of tracing Watling

a

Street in these mountain districts, as he had done elsewhere. The scene was one of those immortalised by Sir Roderick Murchison in his 'Siluria.' Vast rocks in which were imbedded the organic remains of other conditions of our globe; wide slopes of turf dotted with ferns and bilberry bushes, a mountain brook foaming and eddying over its rocky bed, and a true autumnal sunset, made together a scene worthy of Claude or J. M. W. Turner. The Doctor opened his chaise-door and conversed for some minutes. This must have been about the year 1827. Dr. R. W. Darwin was an eminent provincial character, but he will be best remembered by posterity for his felicity in having been the son of a man of true genius-Erasmus Darwin, of Lichfield, and the father of a son still more illustriousCharles Darwin the naturalist.

I would make one self-correction. I have used the name of Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, in connection with Tar-water, and its fame as a universal panacea— it should have been that of Bishop Berkeley. I must also add, that I have been greatly indebted in this volume, as also in the 'Life of Wedgwood,' to Joseph Mayer, Esq., for the use of his collection of manuscripts; and to the Ven. Archdeacon Sandford, Miss Finch, and Edgeworth, Esq., Norwood, for the loan

of letters and papers.