=A Bid for Continental Trade.=--The series of illustrations reproduced throughout the volume show that Sheffield was organized and fully equipped as an art industry, ready and competent to seize foreign markets. To those who imagine that the Sheffield silver plating process was something comparatively trivial, wholly imitative, and more or less of little moment in reckoning the eighteenth century art industries in England, this should come as a shock. We do not remember that Worcester or Derby, Chelsea or Bow, our much vaunted porcelain factories, ever had much relationship with the Continent in the way of trade. Wedgwood did, and the other Staffordshire potters did, because they were more organized than the porcelain factories. It is interesting, therefore, to find that on the Continent a demand had arisen for English metal work. The metalsmiths on the Continent were by no means deficient in originality. For centuries in Italy and in Holland, in Germany and in France, some of the finest workers in gold and silver, in brass and iron, artists in jewels and in enamel, had won a great renown. It is somewhat flattering to find that the foreigner saw, what perhaps was less recognized in the country of its origin, that the work of the Sheffield silver platers stood on a plane apart. And their flattering attentions were not only confined to purchasing replicas of fine English silver. Whether they bought it as being useful from a trade point of view to copy English silver designs, as a short cut to getting fine models, or whether they loved it for its own sake as a cheap and as a beautiful reproduction of fine designs, we cannot determine, but they did the Sheffield platers the honour of copying their technique and there are some fine examples of their work. In France, plated ware in the Sheffield manner was manufactured. We illustrate a coffee pot of no mean design (p. 211) of French workmanship, and it is stated that in Holland and in Russia similar imitations of the Sheffield technique were made. Special marks were compulsory for this plated ware in the country of its origin in order to prevent its sale as solid silver plate. Two French marks illustrated (p. 291) show the words _Doublé_ (copied) or _Plaqué_ (plated) together with figures denoting the quantity of the silver. V CAKE BASKETS DECANTER STANDS OR COASTERS DISH RINGS INKSTANDS AND TAPER HOLDERS CHAPTER V =Cake baskets--Decanter stands or Coasters--Dish rings--Inkstands and taper holders.=