Besides copying from antique objects, Wedgwood tried to rival them in the taste and elegance of original productions. He found out Flaxman when he was an unknown student, and employed him, upon very liberal terms, to design for him; and thus the articles of earthenware which he manufactured proved of the greatest value in the art education of the people. We owe not a little of the improved taste and popular appreciation and enjoyment of the fine arts in our own day to the generous enterprise of Josiah Wedgwood, and his talented designs. In order to secure every access from the potteries to the eastern and western coasts of the island, Wedgwood proposed, and, with the aid of others whom he induced to join him, carried out the Grand Trunk Canal between the Trent and the Mersey. He himself constructed a turnpike road ten miles in length through the potteries, and built a village for his work-people, which he called Etruria, and where he established his works. He died there in 1795, at the age of sixty-five, leaving a large fortune and an honoured name, which he had acquired by his own industry, enterprise, and generosity. A remarkable memorial to the genius and artistic labours of Wedgwood was erected in 1863, and some reference to it should undoubtedly be made in these pages. It is a twofold memorial: a bronze statue at Stoke-upon-Trent, and a memorial institute, erected close to the birth-place of the Great Potter at Burslem. The foundation-stone was laid on the 26th of October by the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., then Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the presence of a very large and enthusiastic assemblage. The Chancellor delivered a public address, which in eloquent terms did homage to Wedgwood's great mental qualities and his services to his country. He described as his most signal and characteristic merit, the firmness and fulness of his perception of the true law of what we term industrial art, or, in other words, of the application of the higher art to industry--the law which teaches us to aim first at giving to every object the greatest possible degree of fitness and convenience for its purpose, and next at making it the article of the highest degree of beauty, which compatibly with that fitness and convenience it will bear--which does not substitute the secondary for the primary end, but recognizes as part of the business the study to harmonize the two.