"Taste is at present the darling idol of the polite world and the world of letters, and, indeed, seems to be considered as the quintessence of almost all the arts and sciences. The fine ladies and gentlemen dress with taste, the architects, whether Gothic or Chinese, build with taste." So writes the essayist in the _Connoisseur_ journal in 1756, and he continues ironically, "Whoever makes a pagoda of his parlour fits up his house entirely in taste." This "Chinese taste" had seized France and Holland. The French artist-craftsmen readily saw that the great influx of Chinese and Japanese furniture would stifle their national artistic impulses. Louis Quatorze had to issue a decree at the end of the seventeenth century to prohibit the import of Oriental wares. The craze reached England later and developed later. But early in the eighteenth century the cabinet-makers of London petitioned Parliament against the importation of manufactured articles from the East Indies to this country. But nothing much seems to have come of their protest. The East India Company had become too powerful to brook interference with its trade by interested artisans. Thousands of lac panels were brought over in the company's ships, even in spite of the deep-rooted belief that lacquer work had at that time become an English art. It is to be presumed that some of the contentions of the old European lacquer-workers may be said to be parallel with the assertions of old potters who asseverated that they had discovered the true porcelain of China. In 1709 Böttger, at Meissen, had for the first time succeeded in producing white hard, paste porcelain, not in imitation of the Chinese, but actually a reproduction of the Oriental technique. But the secret was well kept, and Böttger and his workmen were imprisoned in a fortress. Since Father Du Halde, the Jesuit, had published in Paris in 1725 his _Description de l'Empire de la Chine_, other European potters had endeavoured to find the natural earths of the Chinese, kaolin and petuntse. When William Cookworthy, the chemist and potter of Plymouth, wrote of his discovery of the china clays, Josiah Wedgwood journeyed to Cornwall on a wild-goose chase. It may be imagined, with data such as these to guide us--first, the growing intensity of the "Chinese taste"; second, the demand for furniture and porcelain on the part of the wealthy classes--that as a consequence an attempt was made to supply the demand.