The decoration of Turkish tiles and Turkish ornament generally is of the Saracenic kind, but has neither the beauty nor the invention of the other varieties of Persian. There are no plant nor animal forms in the Turkish variety of Saracenic ornament; it is more allied to the Egyptian Saracenic, but lacks the ingenuity of the latter. The colour is harsh and crude. It is seen at its best in the tomb mosque of Soliman the Great at Constantinople (Fig. 45), built in 1544. The decoration of the palace of the Seraglio and of the “Sultanin Valide” consists of beautiful tiles that were brought from Persia to Constantinople. [Illustration: Fig. 45.—Ornament from the Cupola of the Mosque of Soliman the Great, Constantinople.] FRENCH POTTERY. The art of the potter flourished in Gaul before the time of the Romans, but this early pottery was of a coarse kind, used mostly for domestic purposes, and of an unglazed variety (_poteries mates_). The use of a vitreous glaze was common in France as early as the thirteenth century, and in a grave that had the date of 1120, in the Abbey of Jumièges, two small broken vases were found covered with a yellowish lead glaze. We are informed by an old French chronicler that “On fait des godets à Beauvais.” A _godet_ was a goblet or cup of glazed fayence, with a wide mouth, and often had a cover, and was usually silver-mounted. Beauvais was noted in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for its glazed pottery. It has been mentioned before that the Italian artist, Girolamo della Robbia, introduced the famous enamelled earthenware invented by his grand-uncle, Luca della Robbia, into France, when he came by invitation of Francis I. to decorate the exterior of the Château de Madrid, in the Bois de Boulogne, and the Pesaro maiolica painter, Francesco, also settled and worked in France; but apparently little came of these attempts to naturalise Italian pottery on French soil, except that the art must have been spread in some degree by the workmen, and by French artists who would naturally have assisted the Italians, and the traditions left by the latter must have helped considerably to influence the subsequent fabrication of enamelled earthenware. OIRON WARE. To take our subject in a chronological order, the wares of Oiron, or “Henri-Deux ware,” as the name they are better known by, must be noticed first.