“I was much pleased with the specimens you so kindly sent me of your new art of engraving. That on the china is admirable. No one would suppose it anything but painting. I hope you meet with all the encouragement you merit, and that the invention will be what inventions seldom are, profitable to the inventor. Now, we are speaking of inventions, I know not who pretends to that of copper-plate engraving for earthen ware, and I am not disposed to contest the honor with anybody, as the improvement in taking impressions not directly from the plate, but from printed paper, applicable by that means to other than flat forms, is far beyond my first idea. But I have reason to apprehend that I might have given the hint on which that improvement was made; for, more than twenty years since, I wrote to Dr. Mitchell from America proposing to him the printing of square tiles for ornamenting chimneys, from copper-plates, describing the manner in which I thought it might be done, and advising the borrowing from the booksellers the plates that had been used in a thin folio called ‘Moral Virtue Delineated,’ for that purpose. The Dutch Delft-ware tiles were much used in America, which are only or chiefly Scripture histories wretchedly scrawled. I wished to have those moral prints, which were originally taken from Horace’s poetical figures, introduced in tiles, which, being about our chimneys are constantly in the eyes of the children when by the fireside, might give parents an opportunity in explaining them to express moral sentiments, and I gave expectations of great demands for them if executed. Dr. Mitchell wrote me in answer that he had communicated my scheme to several of the artists in the earthen way about London, who rejected it as impracticable; and it was not till some years after that I first saw an enamelled snuff-box, which I was sure was from a copper-plate, though the curvature of the form made me wonder how the impression was taken.” Sadly and deprecatingly must “Poor Richard” have examined the printed tiles of John Sadler, for no “moral virtues delineated” thereon are depicted. He found, instead, the representation of such trivial and unmoral pastimes as dancing, beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, fortune-telling—the latter design being of an astrologer seated at a table telling the fortunes of two young women. One fair maid smiles with delighted anticipation as she receives a paper of prophecy inscribed “A brisk husband and son,” while the other poor creature is departing, shedding bitter tears of disappointment, with a similar paper bearing the depressing words, “Never to be married.” American children doubtless lost much desirable and laudable parental instruction when Franklin’s worthy scheme failed in execution, but they were also spared many a fireside lecture and nagging. How they would have come to hate the sight of those moral lesson tiles!