g state, with regard to the
whiteness, compactness, and infusibility of the body, the elegance of
the forms, the brilliancy of the colours, the elaborateness of the
drawing, and the superb enrichments of the gilding. The private
manufactories of porcelain in France imitate and approach more or less
near to the royal establishment.

At Berlin and at Vienna are royal porcelain manufactories in high
esteem, as well as in some of the smaller states of Germany.

_BRITISH PORCELAIN._

The first manufactories of porcelain in England were those at Bow, and
at Chelsea, near London. In these, however, nothing but soft porcelain
was made. This was a mixture of white clay and fine white sand from
Alum bay, in the Isle of Wight, to which such a proportion of pounded
glass was added as, without causing the ware to soften so as to
lose its form, would give it when exposed to a full red heat a
semi-transparency resembling that of the fine porcelain of China. The
Chelsea ware, besides bearing a very imperfect similarity in body to
the Chinese, admitted only of a very fusible lead glaze; and in the
taste of its patterns, and in the style of their execution, stood
as low perhaps as any on the list. The china works at Derby come, I
believe, the next in date; then those of Worcester, established in
1751: and the most modern are those of Coalport, in Shropshire; of the
neighbourhood of Newcastle, in Staffordshire, and in other parts of
that county.

The porcelain clay used at present in all the English works is
obtained in Cornwall, by pounding and washing over the gray
disintegrated granite which occurs in several parts of that county: by
this means the quartz and mica are got rid of, and the clay resulting
from the decomposition of the felspar is procured in the form of a
white, somewhat gritty powder. This clay is not fusible by the highest
heat of our furnaces, though the felspar, from the decomposition of
which it is derived, forms a spongy milk-white glass, or enamel, at
a low white heat. But felspar, when decomposed by the percolation of
water, while it forms a constituent of granite, loses the potash,
which is one of its ingredients to the amount of about 15 per cent,
and with it the fusibility that this latter substance imparts.

The siliceous ingredient is calcined flint; and in some of the
porcelain works, (particularly, I believe, those at Worcester,) the
soapstone from the Lizard-point, in Cornwall, is employed. These are