Excerpt from Spode and His Successors One of the most sagacious writers on ceramic art, M. Alexandre Brogniart, Director of the National Factory at Sevres, speaking of this discovery, says in his great work, Tratte des Arts Ceramiques: "Spode fabriqua une porcelaine de beaucoup superieure a toutes celles qui avaient ete faites jusqu'a cette epoque en Angleterre; il chercha a imiter l'ancienne porcelaine tendre de Sevres et s'en approcha beaucoup; il introduisit, ou au moins perfectionna, l'emploi des os calcines dans la pate." (Spode produced a better porcelain than any that had been up to then made in England. He endeavoured to equal the soft porcelain of Sevres, which his paste closely resembled. He introduced, or at any rate perfected, the use of calcined bones in the body of his ware.) Thus Brogniart placed Spode in the first rank. In the earlier period of earthenware, Staffordshire had its secrets and its romances. Its factories were almost Thibetan in their exclusiveness. Now and then foreigners (and everyone was a foreigner who was not a Staffordshire man) came to work there. The Brothers Elers, those mysterious Dutch patricians, formerly silversmiths, entrenched themselves in a great mansion in Bradwell Wood. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.