"This splendid service was commenced in April, 1773, and had upward of twelve hundred views of the seats of noblemen and gentlemen in England, and a green frog was painted underneath each piece. The form chosen was the royal pattern, and was made of the ordinary cream-color ware, with a delicate saffron-tint. The views were in purple camaieu, bordered with a gadroon pattern in Indian-ink, and round the edge a running wreath of mauve flowers and green leaves. The two services for dinner and dessert consisted of nine hundred and fifty-two pieces, had twelve hundred and forty-four enamel views, which cost, on an average, twenty-one shillings each, the borders and frogs to each about fifteen shillings more; making the entire cost, with fifty-one pounds eight shillings and fourpence for the cream-ware itself, a total of twenty-three hundred and fifty-nine pounds two shillings and one penny, without calculating many extras. The price ultimately paid by the empress was stated to be three thousand pounds. In June, 1774, the service was sufficiently completed to exhibit at the new rooms in Portland House, Greek Street, Soho, No. 12, where it remained on show for nearly two months. The empress showed it to Lord Malmesbury when he visited the Grenouillière in 1779." I may refer here also to his partnership with Mr. Bentley as another of the important elements of his success. Bentley was a man with capital, and also a man with an artistic sense; and he coöperated heartily with Wedgwood in a desire for thorough work, for excellence, and for profit. The artistic work for which Wedgwood is so distinguished is what the pottery collector is most interested in. This, as Wedgwood himself has said of all good work, was not the result of chance. From the first he used his _own_ brains and those of others. He studied whatever he could find to improve his profession, and became something of a chemist; so that the values of clays and silex, and the composition and use of metallic oxides for coloring them, grew to be an art in themselves in his hands. The work upon which Wedgwood applied his inventions and his art may be classified in this way: 1. Queen's-ware, for the table. 2. Terra-cotta, to represent porphyry, granite, etc. 3. Basalt, or black Egyptian. 4. White biscuit. 5. Bamboo, cream-colored biscuit. 6. Jasper, or onyx. 7. A hard porcelain biscuit, for chemists, etc.