BELLEEK.--Probably the last attempt that has been made with us to establish a new factory of porcelain was at Belleek, near Lough Erne, in northern Ireland. Here, under the direction of Mr. Armstrong, a very fine and translucent paste was first made in 1857, and a peculiar nacreous lustre was given to the ware by the use of a glaze prepared with a salt of bismuth. The local felspar was employed together with china-clay brought from Cornwall. Some care was given to the modelling in imitation of shells and corals. Little of this ware, which may be classed as a hard-paste porcelain, has been made of recent years. CHAPTER XXII ENGLISH PORCELAIN--(_continued_). THE HARD PASTE OF PLYMOUTH AND BRISTOL The manufacture of true porcelain had but a short life in England. The ware has no especial artistic merit, nor was it ever commercially of much importance. And yet in the history of this short-lived attempt to imitate the porcelain of China and Saxony, we find so many points (in the composition and technique of the ware above all) that illustrate and confirm what we have said in some early chapters, that we shall have to follow up this history somewhat closely. Moreover, the two men, thanks to whose energy and scientific knowledge the difficulties attending the first manufacture of the new substance were overcome, interest us in more ways than one. There is, in the first place, Cookworthy the quaker, who, once he had solved the practical problem that had hitherto baffled all the potters and arcanists of England and France, was content to return to a quiet life among the little _coterie_ of ‘friends’ at Plymouth. The other is Champion, the friend of Burke, who, after his business had been ruined by the American War, preferred to end his life as a farmer in the new country, with whose struggle for independence he had throughout sympathised. The two letters of the Père D’Entrecolles on the manufacture of porcelain in China were known through their publication in Du Halde’s collection soon after the date (1722) at which the second one was written. The search for the essential constituents of a true porcelain at once began. One of the first results of this search was the appearance of the ‘Unaker, the produce of the Cherokee nation of America,’ which is mentioned in Frye’s patent of 1744. Shortly after the middle of the century, as we learn from Borlase’s _History of Cornwall_ (published in 1758), the attention of more than one manufacturer of porcelain was directed to that county. But no one probably was so well equipped for the search as William Cookworthy, the druggist of Plymouth--he was already thoroughly acquainted with the geology of the county. Cookworthy, too, must have carefully studied the letters of the Jesuit missionary. In the memoir written by him at a later date (it is given in full in Owen’s _Two Centuries of Ceramic Art at Bristol_) he clearly distinguishes ‘the _petunse_, the _Caulin_, and the _Wha-she_,’ or soapy rock.[245]