It has been stated in German publications that Böttgher, for the great services rendered by him to the Elector and to Saxony, was made Manager of the Royal Porcelain Works, and further promoted to the dignity of Baron. Doubtless he deserved these honours; but his treatment was of an altogether different character, for it was shabby, cruel, and inhuman. Two royal officials, named Matthieu and Nehmitz, were put over his head as directors of the factory, while he himself only held the position of foreman of potters, and at the same time was detained the King’s prisoner. During the erection of the factory at Meissen, while his assistance was still indispensable, he was conducted by soldiers to and from Dresden; and even after the works were finished, he was locked up nightly in his room. All this preyed upon his mind, and in repeated letters to the King he sought to obtain mitigation of his fate. Some of these letters are very touching. “I will devote my whole soul to the art of making porcelain,” he writes on one occasion, “I will do more than any inventor ever did before; only give me liberty, liberty!” To these appeals, the King turned a deaf ear. He was ready to spend money and grant favours; but liberty he would not give. He regarded Böttgher as his slave. In this position, the persecuted man kept on working for some time, till, at the end of a year or two, he grew negligent. Disgusted with the world and with himself, he took to drinking. Such is the force of example, that it no sooner became known that Böttgher had betaken himself to this vice, than the greater number of the workmen at the Meissen factory became drunkards too. Quarrels and fightings without end were the consequence, so that the troops were frequently called upon to interfere and keep peace among the “Porzellanern,” as they were nicknamed. After a while, the whole of them, more than three hundred, were shut up in the Albrechtsburg, and treated as prisoners of state. Böttgher at last fell seriously ill, and in May, 1713, his dissolution was hourly expected. The King, alarmed at losing so valuable a slave, now gave him permission to take carriage exercise under a guard; and, having somewhat recovered, he was allowed occasionally to go to Dresden. In a letter written by the King in April, 1714, Böttgher was promised his full liberty; but the offer came too late. Broken in body and mind, alternately working and drinking, though with occasional gleams of nobler intention, and suffering under constant ill-health, the result of his enforced confinement, Böttgher lingered on for a few years more, until death freed him from his sufferings on the 13th March, 1719, in the thirty-fifth year of his age. He was buried _at night_—as if he had been a dog—in the Johannis Cemetery of Meissen. Such was the treatment and such the unhappy end, of one of Saxony’s greatest benefactors.