With the Romans we find pottery both made on the spots where they settled and imported from the seats of the ceramic industry in Italy. These display the usual Roman characteristics, and need not be here considered. Crossing the Dark Ages, we find, in the thirteenth century, Germany in possession of processes for the presence of which--so far removed from their accepted centres and from the regular routes by which they travelled--it might be hard to account if it were absolutely necessary to travel by the regular route. We have seen this already in the case of early France. We see it again in Germany. Possibly the Romans may have taught their barbarian subjects something about glazing. Possibly some wanderer to Palestine and the East or to the Saracenic settlements in the South of Europe, or some stranger from these “foreign parts,” may have initiated the German potters in the higher secrets of the art. In any event, Germany was making enamelled faience at least two centuries before Luca della Robbia had perfected his process in Italy. A potter of Schelestadt, in Alsace, is said by the Germans to have discovered tin enamel. Even his name is now forgotten, although his death is said to have occurred in 1283. At Leipsic is a glazed frieze, dated 1207, and at Breslau, in 1230, architectural reliefs of great excellence were produced. Two hundred years later, in 1441, Veit Hirschvogel was using stanniferous enamel. At Strehla, in 1565, the potters were so well skilled in the working of terra-cotta, that they had made a pulpit of that material. One is almost led by these facts to question if Germany did not lead both Italy and France, and to regret that the history of German ceramics has not been more fully opened up to us. One danger let us guard against, for the sake of securing the intelligent understanding of Germany, incompatible with either partiality or prejudice. We need not confound conservative tastes with a “very slow march of ideas.” One rather loves to find an artist so impressed with what is good in his own art, that he is in no haste to leave it in order to catch the first whiff of foreign inspiration. Ideas evidently circulated at a tolerably high rate of speed in a country where the enamelled friezes and monumental bas-reliefs of Leipsic and Breslau existed in the beginning of the thirteenth century. To Leipsic, therefore, Germany is indebted for its first enamelled ware. The friezes above mentioned consisted of tiles with _alto-relievo_ heads of Christ and the Apostles. The enamel is dark green. What occurs to us at once is that no art ever _began_ with such works, and that in them we have the successful results of long experiment. Breslau is made famous by a large work of the same century, representing Henry IV. of Silesia, who died in 1290. The monarch lies stretched upon a tomb surrounded by twenty-one bas-reliefs.