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his name concealed, his wife left behind, his daughter Sarah and her lover, Samuel Walker, accompanying him, and Lavinia Billingsley, a small weakly child of thirteen, wearily trudging beside them or lifted by turns in their arms. The quest for the perfect porcelain had been interrupted, even the brushes lay idle; it was winter with the Billingsley rose.

Something evil had come into the man's life-some act of crime, maybe, but most probably some misdealing with money; enthusiasts and inventors are seldom nicely particular about other people's capital. Whatever his sin or fault had been, it drove him into sudden exile. Earlier than this, his wife had separated herself from him, and for that there may have been serious cause. But his children followed him through all, to their death; Samuel Walker stood by him; and "of this man's failings or indiscretions we have no direct evidence," his first biographer, Mr. Haslem, of Derby, wrote gently. "But that they must have been greatly redeemed by paternal love is proved by the fact that his daughters, who maintained the most affectionate correspondence with their mother, clung to him with so much tenderness." "I shall never see you again," the mother had said. Pathos, as well as mystery and danger, had entered into the fugitive's life, and in those days, when "sensibility" and "sentiment" were a duty as well as a luxury, I think he would mark with tears his "dim and perilous way."

Palissy stands the great tragical figure in the history of ceramics, but Billingsley seems the more pathetical to me. When he fled he changed his name, and, as "Mr. Beeley" he was to know every kind of privation and sorrow. Late in the year 1808 Sarah Billingsley, then twenty-five years old, wrote to her mother with great secrecy, addressing the letter to a third hand,

mentioning no names, using initials only, and both wafering down and sealing what she wrote. Expressed in the style of a period older than 1808, the letter reads quaintly to-day. The four inlanders, far from their mountainous Midland shire, had come very near real shipwreck, it appears. "Your prayers, my Dear Mother, are heard," the letter says, "and we are again in our Native Country after experiencing very great hardships which would fill pages to recount. I don't recollect whether I told you that after the Storm and we got into Harbor I durst not venture on Shipboard again but preferred walking between 50 and 60 miles. I thought your last words were prophetic when you said you should never see us more. I had a thousand anxious fears for you. I was doubtful whether you would ever hear of our fate, on account of the name we went by"-the alias of these pilgrims of porcelain and love.

It is impossible to be sure of what had happened to the Billingsleys in their exodus so far. But I think they would have struck south from Derby through Cannock Chase to the Staffordshire potteries, where the Davenports were making china at that date. Then, disappointed of employment, they would make for the porcelain potteries of the West, going to Worcester first, and at first almost fruitlessly, no doubt. So, coming to the Severn mouth, they would take a coaster bound for Swansea, where porcelain of a kind was then being made. The storm which scared Sarah Billingsley would come upon them in the Bristol Channel, and the little ship would run for Newport or Cardiff; whence the four would trudge the "50 or 60 miles" to Swansea, only to be disappointed again. Billingsley would then write to the famous firm of Barr, Flight and Barr, at Worcester, accepting the wages-"very low for a good hand" as his daughter said-which he had at first refused;

he certainly did write to the firm to beg "a little Money" for the journey to Worcester. The wanderers made that journey afoot, "all the way Back, which in the whole amounted to near 400 miles," Sarah Billingsley informed her mother. It need not be "near 400 miles" from Swansea to Worcester, of course, but dread of arrest would cause the wanderers to avoid the more direct and public highways; and thus one sees them toiling northward from Cardiff, up the Taff valley, past the hamlet of Nantgarw, and so rounding to Worcester and their "Native Country" through the wild glens of midland Wales.

At Worcester the Billingsley rose began to flower again, and the collector finds it on Barr, Flight and Barr ware, -on tea-things and dessert-services chiefly, often in floriated panels or "reserves" set in borders of blurred and blackish blue, or nestling inside the cups. But the rose is not in its full glory; there was a lack of heart in Billingsley's art at this period; the free and impressionist style persisted, but the zest and zeal for perfection had waned. Yet the flowers which fell from his brush so took the eye of the other painters that even at Worcester he founded a school. But he was only a “hand" again, his pay at first "little better than that of the common hands," and the cost of living at Worcester was found to be "so extremely high, that with every frugality," Sarah Billingsley wrote, she could lay by no money to send to her mother. "I wish, my Dear Mother, I had it in my power, but hope, when our wages come to be settled and Mr. W. gets work, I shall be able to send you something to come to us." The two girls had found work in the factory, "Mr. W." was Samuel Walker, whom Sarah was to marry; he, too, had followed Billingsley through all, with devotion that speaks well for both.

Background to these humble affairs,

the most world-shaking events were occurring; but Billingsley sat absorbed in plans for the perfect porcelain, and almost inconsciently painting the rose. The Reign of Terror had raged while he was trying his first recipe for a hard, white, translucent paste, at Derby, and about the time he took ship for Swansea Napoleon had entered Spain. So now, while the Army of Moscow in rags and jags drifts westward, the potter-painter (like Napoleon) plans a new effort, a fresh start. In 1813 the Billingsleys and Samuel Walker took to the road clandestinely again; they had a new reason for secrecy, and they made for lonely Nantgarw.

Nantgarw was then a hamlet of five or six houses, solitary amidst hills. They were coaly hills, and I daresay Billingsley's imagination saw them all consumed in huge kilns, which were to rise for the firing of a world-pervasive perfect porcelain, that should penetrate to Pekin itself; for Nantgarw stood conveniently placed for water-carriage, on a canal that reached to a port, the port of Cardiff, some seven or eight miles away. During his first journey in Wales, Billingsley had noted the fitness of Nantgarw for concealing yet aiding the enterprise of an outlawed potter, and he would approach the place in high hope the second time. For he was now in funds again. Somehow or other, in part, perhaps, by revealing to the Chamberlains of Worcester-rivals of Flight and Barr-suggestions which enabled them later to mix the compost for their beautiful "Regent" china; in part almost certainly by conveying hints to Mr. Rose, of the Coalport China Works; and in part, beyond doubt, by building two kilns "on the new or reverberating principle,” Billingsley and Walker had got together capital with which to build kilns of their own. For that purpose they went to Nantgarw.

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Billingsley approached Nantgarw the second time with two hundred and fifty pounds in his fob. Shilling by shilling the precious little capital had been gathered together. Sarah Billingsley-

Sarah Walker she was by this-would lament that none of this almost fabulous store of wealth should be spent on bringing the mother to the wedding and the common life of the family again; but that is ever your inventor's way. Mrs. Billingsley might weep like a Hecuba at Derby, but what was Hecuba to him? Neither Hecuba nor the great doings of Wellington in Spain just then would occupy Billingsley's mind a minute; for him the engrossing thing was at Nantgarw to mix and fire the porcelain of his dreams.

He mixed and fired the nearest thing to his ideal porcelain at last. The paste and glaze of Nantgarw china have been compared with falling snow, a clarified silvery fluid just crystallized. Nantgarw ware was made of fusible glass mixed in with just as much finelypowdered non-fusible white matter as the glass would take up and hold; and no porcelain so thin and shining, so blanched and translucent, has ever been made elsewhere. The wanderer's porcelain inspired his brush again, and the Billingsley roses never flowered more beautifully eglantine than they

did in the Vale of Nantgarw; there is something of April in the ware and all of June in the rose. With what delight, with what pride and zest, the artist in the man would set to work on what the potter in him had produced! Seven "Nantgarw" plates of Billingsley's painting were recently sold for 971., and one of these poems in porcelain has been bought for as much as twenty-six guineas. But when the ware was new it failed to hold the market. The compost was brittle, and "nine-tenths of the articles were either shivered or injured in shape" by the heat of the kiln. Nantgarw table-ware turned out to be "too bright and good for human nature's daily food," and the purely ornamental pieces cost much to make and were rarely sold. Writing himself. "William Beeley," the artist-potter memorialized the Government for patronage, but that was no better a time for national subsidies to the arts than is our own. Within six months the tiny pottery at Nantgarw had used up the tiny capital, and a partner had to be found. The partner brought in 6001.; but after a while "the concern was again in danger of sinking, when an agreement was entered into with the proprietor of the Swansea pottery, and the work was removed there."

The proprietor of the "Cambrian Pottery" at Swansea was Mr. L. W. Dillwyn, "a botanist of some note and an author of some repute in natural history subjects"; one sees him welcome a fellow-idealist in Billingsley. So now for a time the kilns at Nantgarw stand cold, and "can this beautiful white compost be strengthened and hardened?" is the problem at Swansea. But again the experiments failed. Between the trial and re-trial firings Billingsley painted and taught to paint; there is a special impasto in the enamel of the Swansea "Billingsley" rose. But the perfect porcelain was still the chief aim, and "Another try, sir-a little more

money?" would be Billingsley's con- for a living, as a "hand" again.

stant appeal. Maybe he was on the edge of success the day the thunderbolt came, through the post. "While endeavoring to strengthen and improve this beautiful body," Mr. Dillwyn related afterwards, "I was surprised at receiving a notice from Messrs. Flight and Barr of Worcester, charging the parties calling themselves Walker and Beeley with having clandestinely left an engagement at their works, and forbidding me to employ them. Flight and Barr in the most gentlemanly way convinced me that this granular body"soft china has a granular fracture, like lump sugar-"could never be made any use, and as it was not worth their while to prosecute them, the runaways went back to Nantgarw."

That was in 1817, and the staggering Billingsley received two other blows that year; in January the faithful Sarah died, and in September died Lavinia. On the day of this second bereavement the father wrote to his wife a letter marked by blots and erasures, that spoke his anguish of mind. "My sufferings are now arrived at the highest pitch of Misery. Our dearest Lavinia is taken away from me, the only prop I had left." He was now "a distress'd inconsolable mortal never more to be happy. Think, oh think, what troubles I have! But all my other troubles are as nothing compared with the severe loss of my dearest children, whom no man ador'd more." The note of pathos and tragedy sounds through the stilted eighteenth-century style.

Back at Nantgarw, he made a fresh and heroic endeavor, but three years later he stood midst his cold kilns and the utter ruin of his hopes: two thousand pounds of capital, subscribed by "gentlemen of the County," had been sunk in vain. He went to Coalport The Cornhill Magazine.

Mr.

John Rose, of the china works there, had promised that at Coalport his revised and re-revised recipe for the perfect porcelain should be tried. Tried it was, but again it failed, in its last chance; and thenceforward the beautiful Billingsley china, no more renewed, was to waste and lessen in quantity by kitchen breakages, and only out of long neglect and suppression win at last to a niche beside the treasured "Chelsea" ware itself. Billingsley did not live to see that triumph, and bitter it must have been for him to know that at Coalport, and at Swansea also, his recipes were modifying pastes which were not to be associated with his name. But his brush remained to him: I think he sometimes painted on Bloor china, which would reach him by stage-wagon from Derby. Certainly at Coalport he founded a school, and thus through the influence of that famous pottery he came to transform the styles of chinapainting all over England, and even abroad: so vivid and life-giving is art, though "the potter tempering soft earth" may fail.

In the year 1826 Mrs. Billingsley died: there is no evidence that she had ever seen her daughters or her husband since they fled away, eighteen years before. In 1828 Billingsley himself expired, in a little house "near the works at Coalport, on the Shifnal road," and all seemed ended: the Nantgarw kilns stood deserted, the pilgrim of porcelain was gathered into the great compost himself. But fame for his shade has come, and still in cabinet and gallery, on plate and saucer, cup and dish, spill-case and vase and bowpot, blooms in time-heightened beauty and value the incomparable, the ineffable, the Billingsley rose.

J. H. Yoxall, M.P.

MATE IN TWO MOVES.

There is a delusion abroad in the world that chess is a game of Persian origin, but you would do well not to advance this meagre hypothesis in Altpoppendorf. For Altpoppendorf will have much pleasure in proving unto you with hammering gutturals with hammering fists if you are too dense that you have simply confounded the two predicative adjectives, Persian and Prussian. The first article of the Altpoppendorfian "Quicumque vult" is, that schach-or chess -was invented at Altpoppendorf; and those who make a show of not accepting this clause are unpopular at Altpoppendorf.

When you go to Altpoppendorf you can easily acquire and maintain the impression that you have walked into chessland. The village is set in a shallow saucer of a plain that is devoted to the raising of flowers for seed, and up to the close horizon in all directions are laid vast glaring squares of startling variety of hue. The cubical houses, with their white plaster and black timber walls, have the look of fancy chess pieces set ready for some competition of giants. And walking in this land of right angles,-the acute and obtuse variations are unrecognized in Altpoppendorf,-and influenced by the "Quicumque vult" of the village, you would not be greatly surprised to see a gigantic thumb and forefinger come out of the clouds, take up by its, waist the old gray church tower, and set it down with a thunderous "Check!" in a square of marigolds or hollyhocks, or some other flower that is out of men's minds for the year anywhere but at Altpoppendorf.

The moral atmosphere is even more richly impregnated than the material with the fine flavor of the noblest of games. The very childhood's "Hüp

spiel," or hopscotch, takes on the importance of a sixty-four square complication, and chess is in Altpoppendorf an integral part of the primary education. When the infants of Altpoppendorf wend their way of an early morning hour towards the vil lage school,-in long hand-linked files, looking with their light flaxen plaits or close-cropped little round white skulls, their china-bull eyes, and their print garments of faint hue, as if their overzealous mothers had scrubbed all the color out of them,-the last question shot from the home door after the retreating Hänschen or Gretschen is, "Hast thou then man's chessboard?" A child who at eight years of age does, not know as many openings, is sighed over as one who is pitifully backward with the "Einmaleins"-the "once one is one"-of life. A sound theoretical and practical knowledge of chess, among other things, is demanded of those who present themselves for the degree of confirmation, which in the Fatherland is rather an entrance into this world than a first independent step towards the next, and may therefore without impropriety be accorded as fitly for proficiency in a noble and highly logical game as for the mechanical repetition of "Vaterunser" and the articles of faith. Chess is the Altpoppendorfian's main business of life from his cradle, where he endeavors to suck the color out of a coral pawn, to that last tussle with Death, finest of combatants, against whom no man has ever scored so much as a drawn game. And as your skilful player stereotypes more and more opening moves, till at the end he can leap over fifteen or twenty of these and come without vain preliminaries to the heart of the matter, so it is with the Altpoppendorfian in his social relations.

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