This is the first mention that we have of these fascinating little ‘toys and trinkets.’ They often bear inscriptions in a somewhat lame French, which we might have looked for rather on the rival wares of ‘Stratford-atte-Bowe’ than at a factory where we have reason to believe more than one Frenchman was employed. Of these toys a representative collection was made by Lady Charlotte Schreiber, and there are many charming specimens in the British Museum. We must remember that about this time, and perhaps earlier (1740-50), Saint-Cloud and, above all, Mennecy, were turning out a similar class of objects. The Chelsea sale of 1756 is the earliest of which a catalogue has been preserved, and in it we find the first mention of the ‘mazareen’ blue, a colour after this time largely used as a ground for the more elaborate vases, both at Chelsea and at other English factories. The rage for porcelain was then at its height, and we see traces of this in the advertisements of the time; but in 1757 Sprimont fell ill, and little was made at Chelsea. In 1759 the collection of Chelsea porcelain made by the already-mentioned Sir Everard Fawkner, lately deceased, was sold by auction. The sale occupied several days, and in the advertisement we come across the earliest reference to the use of green _en camaïeu_--‘a tea and coffee equipage, exquisitely painted in green landscapes.’ It was about this time, Professor Church thinks, that the artificial frit-paste was replaced at Chelsea by one containing a large quantity of bone-ash (as much as fifty per cent. in some cases). The earlier material of the French type must have been very difficult to work, and it softened so readily in the kiln that many specimens were spoiled in the firing. It had, however, a certain mellow charm given by its translucency and by the close unison of paste and glaze, that was never equalled in the later material. Indeed the high-water mark of the Chelsea factory was reached in the years that succeeded Sprimont’s first illness of 1757. It was then that the use of gilding became more general.[221] The gold was laid on by means of an amalgam, the mercury being expelled by the heat of the muffle. The result, after burnishing, was to give a brilliant surface of pure gold unlike the solid chiselled lines and bands of dullish surface seen on Sèvres china. But from an artistic point of view this result is not very satisfactory--indeed, nothing has helped more to give a certain garish and vulgar air to much of the English porcelain made at this time.