[Illustration: OLD LIVERPOOL JUG (7-1/4 IN. HIGH). (Transfer-printed in black.) Landscape and Heads entitled “Courtship and Matrimony.” _From the Collection of Capt. H. F. Maclean._] We reproduce as a headpiece two exquisitely black printed Liverpool tiles. It is true they are badly damaged, but their quaint designs were worth the preserving. The one with the gallant sportsman firing at a deer at very close range is queerly out of perspective. The other tile is a typically English rural scene, and pity it is that more of our rustic scenery has not found its way to our national china. [Illustration: LIVERPOOL MUG (6 IN. HIGH). (Transfer-printed and partly coloured after glazing.) _From the Collection of Capt. H. F. Maclean._] Another of our illustrations is that of a Liverpool mug with subject entitled “The Tithe Pig,” in which the vicar appears to have come off worst in a wordy encounter with two of his parishioners. There is a grim humour about many of the eighteenth-century decorated mugs and jugs which are a record in ceramics of party strifes and of long-forgotten social enmities. It will be seen that the Liverpool printed ware has in it an element of decoration which some of the other wares do not possess. Many of our readers doubtless possess specimens of this black or brown printed ware, mugs, or tiles, or teapots with old-world scenes upon them like the landscapes of our illustration. Shepherds and herds, fifers and fiddlers and dancers, village-green sports, lads and lasses “dancing the hays”—these are the homely scenes transferred from the old copper-plates. XIV WEDGWOOD [Illustration: WEDGWOOD DINNER PLATES FROM DESIGNS IN FLAXMAN’S SKETCH-BOOK. PRODUCED OVER 100 YEARS AGO AT ETRURIA, AND STILL MADE BY THE FIRM. I. Strawberry. II. Lag and Feather. III. Feather border. IV. Bell-flower and leaf pattern. _By courteous permission of Messrs. Josiah Wedgwood & Sons._] [Illustration: WEDGWOOD JASPER CUP AND SAUCER. _By courtesy of Messrs. Josiah Wedgwood & Sons._] XIV WEDGWOOD The pottery made in England did not exhibit any marked characteristic, nor was it of much artistic value until Josiah Wedgwood, by his genius, raised Staffordshire ware to such a degree of perfection that it was universally used on the Continent of Europe. Josiah Wedgwood, the youngest of a family of thirteen, was born in 1730, and came of a race of potters. There were Wedgwoods, potters, at Burslem, in the seventeenth century. We give an illustration of a puzzle jug having the inscription, “John Wedg Wood, 1691” (see p. 212).