From silk that befits empresses to hemp, the material of sackcloth, the way is long. But it must not be overlooked, in regard to the textile manufactures of Lancashire, that each extreme is familiar. Warrington, in the bygones, prepared more than half the entire quantity of sailcloth required for the navy. It was a ship laden with hemp from the Baltic for use in Lancashire which, touching at the Isle of Skye, brought the first news of Prince Charles Edward's landing there. Lancashire produces one-sixth of all the paper made in England. In other words, there are in this county about fifty of the nearly 300 English paper-mills, including the very largest of them--Messrs. Wrigley and Sons', near Bury. The first to be established was Crompton's, at Farnworth, near Bolton, which dates from 1676, or exactly eighty-eight years after the building of the famous Kentish one referred to by Shakspere,[25] which itself followed, by just a century, the primeval one at Stevenage. Every description of paper, except that required for bank-notes, is made in Lancashire. The mills themselves, like the dyeworks, haunt the river-sides, though they no longer draw their supplies of water from the stream. Paper-works cannot possibly prosper if there be iron in the water they use, or decomposed vegetable matter. Hence in Lancashire it is now customary to sink wells of considerable depth, and in any case to provide for elaborate filtration. No spectacle in its way is more wonderful than that of a paper-machine at work. There is no limit to the length of the piece it is able to produce continuously, save that which is imposed by its own restricted dimensions. A roll could be made--as it is--of three or four miles in length, the cylinder gradually gathering up the pulp till it can hold no more. Very interesting also is it to observe the variety of material now employed. Esparto, or "Spanish grass," is brought to Liverpool (as to Cardiff and Newcastle) in exchange for coal, and wood-pulp from Norway and Sweden _viâ_ Hull. [25] Sir John Spielman's, at Dartford.--_Vide_ 2nd Henry VI., Act iv. Scene 7. At Darwen we find the largest and most important production in England of the ornamental wall-papers which now take the place of the distemper painting of ancient Egypt, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. The manufacture was originally very similar to block calico-printing. In or about 1839 Messrs. C. & J. G. Potter introduced "rollers," with the additional novelty of the pattern being cut in relief; and this is now almost universal, the Messrs. Potter having progeny, as it were, all over the country, though they themselves still produce quite one-half of the quantity consumed. They have customers in every part of the civilised world, and adapt their work to the diverse and often fantastic tastes of all in turn, directed not uncommonly, as in the case of the Hindoos and the Japanese, by native designs, which they are required to follow implicitly.