It would be a dreary task to enter with any detail into the history of the Sèvres works during the hundred years following the first introduction of the hard paste. This period is associated in most minds with the colossal vases that are to be found in so many of the palaces and museums of Europe. To judge from these examples, it would seem that the chief object both of the design and the decoration was to conceal as far as possible the nature of the material used in their composition. You have first to persuade yourself that you are looking at something made of porcelain: once convinced of this, you marvel at the technical difficulties that have been overcome in its manufacture, but what it never even occurs to one to look for in these monstrous vases, is any trace of that beauty of surface and brilliancy of decoration that we are accustomed to associate with the substance of which they are composed. The ‘Medici Vase’ now in the Louvre is probably the earliest of this long series. This vase dates from the year 1783, and it is nearly seven feet in height. But it was in the pseudo-classical style of the empire, when encouraged by Napoleon’s love of the gigantic, and by his desire ‘_à faire parler la porcelaine_,’[195] that this new application of porcelain found its full expression. It is then that we find vases, candelabra, _surtouts de table_ and clocks, in styles distinguished as Egyptian, Etruscan, Imperial, and Olympian. After this we can follow the decline of taste in the succeeding _régimes_ till, with the total extinction of all feeling for harmony of colour and unity of composition, we are landed--in the reign of the ‘bourgeois king’--in the style or absence of style which is the French equivalent of our ‘Early Victorian.’ There is one name above all others that is associated, at Sèvres, with this long period, that of Alexandre Brongniart, who was director of the works from the year 1804 until his death in 1847. The son of a well-known architect, and himself a fellow-worker with Cuvier, he attained some distinction both as a geologist and as a chemist. It was indeed from the point of view of a man of science that he approached the subject of ceramics,--as a geologist to examine the position and stratigraphical relation of any material suitable for fictile purposes, as a chemist to analyse these materials and to discover fresh metallic combinations suitable for glazes and enamels.