It was just at this moment, when William De Morgan was already sixty-six, that he startled the world and amazed his most intimate friends by revealing himself in a new and altogether unexpected capacity. Suddenly, without any warning, the great potter appeared before the public as a successful novelist. There are comparatively few men in any age who have attained distinction in two separate branches of art. Great poet-painters there have been, it is true, such as Michelangelo in Italy of the Renaissance, and Dante Rossetti in our own times, but there was generally a close connection between their creations in the different arts. Either the picture was inspired by the sonnet, or the verses gave birth to the painting. It would be difficult to trace any connection between De Morgan’s tiles and the novels which his prolific pen poured forth in his later years. Yet, as I have often heard him explain, his novels were indirectly the result of his work as a potter. It was during these first fifty years of his life, when he was busily engaged in making experiments and looking about for boys and men whom he could train to help him, that he acquired the familiarity with the working classes and dwellers in the slums which is one of the most striking features of his novels. The close and daily contact into which he was brought with his own potters, listening to their talk and watching them at work as he sat in a corner of the factory making designs or meditating new inventions, gave him that intimate knowledge of their habits and language, that insight into the points of view and prejudices of their class of which he writes with so much sympathy and kindly humour. As a boy he remembered being told by his father, the professor of mathematics, that he possessed some literary power, and that if he applied himself to books he might do something in that line. But in those early days, young De Morgan’s sole ambition was to be a painter. So he entered the Academy school and, like Charles Heath in ‘Alice-for-Short,’ gave up painting to design stained glass, giving this up in turn when, about the age of thirty, he started his experiments as a potter. But he never made any attempt at original composition until he wrote his first novel, ‘Joseph Vance,’ when he was well on in the sixties.