In the lengthy treatise of the Abbé Raynal on the history of the _Commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes_, there is an interesting section treating of the porcelain of China and Japan, and of the relation of these Oriental wares to the porcelain of Saxony and France. The work was first published in 1770, but the remarks on porcelain were probably written several years earlier. We have already noticed the six classes into which he divides the wares imported from the East. We can only note here that Raynal distinguishes the two classes of _porcelaine blanche_--one of creamy tint, and the other cold and bluish. This ware, he says, was imitated at Saint-Cloud, but with ‘frit’ and lead glaze. His sympathies are all for the true porcelain of Dresden, and for the ware lately made in France by the Count Lauraguais. We have attempted in this chapter, perhaps at too great a length for a work of this kind, to follow the steps by which the knowledge and appreciation of Oriental porcelain spread gradually through the West. It will be our next task to show, as briefly as possible, how on the ground thus prepared there arose on all sides a desire to imitate this beautiful ware. CHAPTER XIV THE FIRST ATTEMPTS AT IMITATION IN EUROPE What, then, were the wares with which the porcelain of the Far East came into competition, when during the course of the seventeenth century it reached Europe in ever increasing quantity? It was not the ordinary lead-glazed pottery, or the salt-glazed stoneware in common use, that felt this competition. Crockery of this sort would always be protected by its cheapness. The rivalry was rather with the more artistic ware found on the tables of the richer sort of people, much of it made for ornament only. Now at this time, ware of this latter kind all came under the class of _enamelled fayence_--earthenware, that is, whose dull surface was rendered bright and shining by a coating of stanniferous enamel; on this artificial surface the decoration, often pre-eminent in artistic merit, was painted. It is not our business here to show how this great ceramic family of stanniferous enamelled ware, which had now spread over Europe, had its origin in the nearer or Saracenic East, just as the porcelain, which in a measure was destined to replace it, can all be traced back to a Chinese source. Suffice to say that, starting from the Moorish potteries of Spain, this enamelled fayence gradually replaced the old lead-glazed slip ware of the Italian _quattrocento_, and in the sixteenth century was carried by Italian workmen to France, where important centres of manufacture were established at Rouen and at Nevers.