6

some three hundred pieces, and sending them to a glass-house; but it was the old story; and nothing came of it, excepting that one of his compositions began to melt. This, however, was enough for Palissy, and encouraged him to two years' further labour, during which I did nothing,' he says, but go and come between my house and the adjacent glass-house, aiming to succeed in my intentions.' How many years further he would have gone on, we cannot tell, but now the sun broke suddenly through the clouds. Believing it possible had rendered it possible. With devout thankfulness, Bernard thus narrates the first successful issue of his labours :- God willed, then, when I had begun to lose my courage, and was gone for the last time to a glass furnace, having a man with me carrying three hundred kinds of trial pieces, there was one among those pieces which was melted within four hours after it had been placed in the furnace, which trial turned out white and polished, in a way that caused me such joy, as made me think I was become a new creature.' The said enamel, he afterwards says, was singularly beautiful.' To the weary eyes of Bernard, who, for nearly ten long years, had been looking for it in every piece of pottery baked in his own furnaces, at the potter's, and at the glass-house, it must have been singularly beautiful' indeed. What waking and sleeping dreams had not Palissy that day! But the reward for his labour was as yet but small, and this beautiful' bit of his own enamelling was all that he had for many months on which to feast the eyes of his mind and imagination, for a greater trial than any he had yet passed through awaited him.

The secret of enamelling was discovered. What next? To think was to do, and Palissy at once began to make pots. First, taught only by his own genius, he spent eight months in making vessels; next, with unassisted hand, he erected a furnace like that of the glassworkers. In this work he was his own mason; he tempered his own mortar; himself drew the water with which it was tempered; and himself went up and down for the bricks, because he had no means ' to pay for even one man's aid. At last the furnace was built, but the work was not yet done. Night and day, for more than a month, the potter slaved to grind the materials for the enamel, and then the vessels were placed. Alas! the whole year's labour was in vain. Six days and nights the potter watched the furnace, feeding it with wood, and grinding fresh enamel. The enamel would not melt. Now, 'stupified with labour,' and 'like a man in desperation,' he spent his last money in buying fresh pots, on which fresh enamel was placed. The furnace fire was now going out, and he had no wood to keep it alive. There was no alternative. First, the palings of his garden were torn down; still the enamel did not melt. There was no alternative. The chairs and tables of his house were broken up and sacrificed to the insatiable element. Still the enamel did not melt. There was no alternative. Mad with despair, at midnight, he entered his house, tore up its flooring, and consigned it to the flames, and the enamel was melted. One does not wonder to read after this the following ::-'I suffered now an anguish that I cannot speak, for I was quite exhausted and

dried up by the heat of the furnace - it was more than a month since my shirt had been dry upon me.' Worse than this, his wife - her from whom solace was due,' ran crying through the town that he was burning up his floors; neighbours came and taunted him; he was in debt; his credit was taken from him; none gave him consolation; and, scorned as a fool and a madman, he was told that he ought to die of hunger and perish.' More than all, the brave and generous heart of the despised workman was pained, because some said he was labouring to make false money, and at this he 'pined away,' with only little hope, because the last trials had turned out tolerably well.' The little hope buoyed him up, and for his next trials he contrived to secure the assistance of a labouring potter, who made vessels from his designs, but he was compelled to part with him at the end of six months; and, having no money, to give him his own clothes for wages. He built another furnace for this trial, and again spent days and nights in grinding the enamel. If at this time his wife complained of the want of his society, can we wonder? Unhappily, the result of this third baking was worse than any previous. The enamel was perfect, but the pots were spoiled by flints from the oven. Palissy might, however, have sold them for a trifle, but, although himself, his wife, and children were starving, this he could not do. He would not sell such labour for a paltry price. With his own hands he resolutely broke the entire pieces of the batch, and then - lay down in melancholy,' and while he lay in his own house, reproaches and maledictions were showered upon him from every side.

Our space will not allow us to follow minutely the further steps of the Potter. Our readers will have found that he was not a man to give way to disappointment or despair, and he soon recovered from his last failure, and henceforth his difficulties were fewer. Year by year he improved his method and style of manufacture, spending the whole of the money realized by the increasing sale of his ware either in erecting new furnaces, or making new experiments. One of his most celebrated inventions was that of rustic figulines,' or figures in pottery, in imitation of wild animals, reptiles, &c. In this he was remarkably successful; and so exact, we are told, were his copies from nature, that the astonished dogs' of Saintes would come and bark at the canine figures he would place at his door. In a short time Palissy's fame had extended through France, and he received orders for ornamental pottery *and figulines from Catherine de Medici, the queen-mother, and the Constable de Montmorenci downwards; and had he not been a Huguenot, whom neither bribes nor threats could turn from his faith, his course henceforward would have been without a shadow or a cloud.

6

Religious troubles, however, broke out in Saintes. The Reformed

Palissy's art died with him. Of the estimation in which his ware is now held, the reader may form some opinion, when told that a Palissy vase sold lately in London for £57 15s., and a candlestick for £20.

religion was proscribed; its adherents were hunted down, seized, imprisoned, and at once beheaded. Palissy had been one of the most active teachers and professors of the new faith. He helped to form the first church in Saintes, the six members of which met once a week in an upper room to read and expound the new-found Word together. When the troubles, of which he has himself given us the history, broke out, he remained quietly at home, reading, he says, when ever temptation assailed him, the seventy-ninth Psalm, which begins, O God, the heathen are come into Thine inheritance.' But he had been too prominent an actor in the religious sedition to be long overlooked, and before three months had elapsed from the burning of the first heretic in Saintes, Palissy found himself in a dungeon at Bordeaux, hurried thither at dead of night, and there awaiting sentence of execution.

It was here that his Art stood him in need. He was working for great patrons, and Montmorenci at once exerted himself to bring about his release. An edict procured by Catherine, and issued in the name of the king, appointed Palissy Inventor of rustic figulines to the King and the Constable, and as a servant of the Crown he was at once set at liberty.

It is strikingly characteristic of the fearless mind of Palissy, that one of his first acts on his release from custody, was to publish a collection of four treatises, dedicated to his patrons, the constable and his son, the queen-mother and the people. This was his second published work the first, a medical treatise, is lost. The essays were respectively, on the Improvement of Agriculture; on certain Discoveries he had made in Natural History; on a plan of a Delectable Garden; and on a New Plan for a Fortified Town. In the dedications to these treatises he boldly avows his religious principles and ecclesiastical leanings. 'I would like,' he says to the reader, to beg of the nobility of France, that after I shall have occupied my time to do them service, it will please them not to return me evil for good, as the Roman ecclesiastics of this town have done, who have desired to get me hung, for having sought, on their behalf, the greatest good that could accrue to them, which is, for having wished to incite them to feed their flocks, following God's commandment. And no man can say, that ever I have done them any wrong; but, because I urged upon them their perdition, according to the eighteenth of the Apocalypse, seeking thus to amend them; and because many times also I had shown them a text written in the prophet Jeremiah, where he says, "Woe unto you, pastors, who drink the milk and wear the wool, and leave my sheep scattered upon the mountains! I will demand them again of your hands." They, seeing such a thing, instead of amending, hardened themselves, and banded themselves together against the light.' The simple potter adds, 'I never would have thought that for that cause they would have wished to take occasion to put me to death!'

While the above treatises were passing through the press, in the year 1564, Palissy, at fifty-five years of age, removed from Saintes to Paris, there personally to superintend his works at the Tuileries, to ornament which he had been engaged by Catherine de Medici, for whom

this celebrated palace was then being erected. Here, in the precincts of the Tuileries, the potter lived for many years. We find him in 1570, still working in the garden of the palace. In 1575, he commenced a course of philosophical lectures in Paris, in which he explained and defended his discoveries in various branches of science, before the most learned audiences of the time. In 1584, being then seventy-five years of ages, he was still delivering these lectures. In a contemporary publication of that time, he is described as a man of remarkably ready and acute wit, who was flourishing at Paris, giving lessons in his science and profession.' Some of these lectures were printed in Palissy's third and last book in 1580, and bore the following title, at which one would smile, did we not know from what a simple and unaffected heart the title came :

'ADMIRABLE DISCOURSES on the Nature of Water Fountains, as well Natural as Artificial; on Metals, on Salts, and Salt Springs, on Stones, on Earths, on Fire, and on Enamels. With many and other excellent Results on Natural Things. Also, a Treatise on Marl, very useful and necessary for those who are concerned in Agriculture. The whole drawn up in Dialogues, wherein are introduced, Theory and Practice. By M. Bernard Palissy, Inventor of Rustic Figulines to the King and to the Queen, his Mother.'

We now draw near the last days of the Huguenot Potter. In the year following the date last mentioned, in 1585, the young king, Henri III., finding,' says Mr. Morley, no other way of saving himself from the imminent danger in which he was placed by the extreme Catholic party, put himself at the head of their league, and issued a decree, prohibiting the future exercise of the Reformed worship on pain of death, and banishing all those who had previously adhered to it.' From such a decree, Bernard, though he had served the Crown now for more than forty years, could not hope to escape. True, he was seventy-six years of age, and one would have thought that the grey hairs of the venerable man would have saved him from the common doom; but in the times of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew neither young men nor maidens, old men nor children, found mercy. The State knew as little of that as of tolerance, and Palissy was dragged to the Bastile. Here, that Church which is filled with the blood of the saints' clamoured for his immediate execution, but the influence of powerful friends was interposed, and sentence was deferred.

·

Palissy had been three years shut up within the walls of his prison, when he received one day a visit from the king, the particulars of which have been handed down to us by two contemporary writers, De Sancy and the Admiral D'Aubigne. Mr. Morley has given it in the words of the former authority :

'My good man,' said the king, you have been forty-five years in the service of the queen my mother, or in mine, and we have suffered you to live in your own religion, amidst all the executions and the massacres. Now, however, I am so pressed by the Guise party, and my people, that I have been compelled, in spite of myself, to imprison these two poor women [fellow-sufferers with

Palissy] and you; they are to be burnt to-morrow, and you also, if you will not be converted.'

We know of nothing finer in the history of the whole army of martyrs than the royal answer of Palissy to this speech :

'Sire,' answered the old man, the Count de Maulverier came yesterday, on your part, promising life to these two sisters if they would each give you a night. They replied that they would now be martyrs for their own honour, as well as for the honour of God. You have said several times that you feel pity for me; but it is I who pity you, who have said, "I am compelled." That is not speaking like a king. These girls and I, who have part in the kingdom of heaven, we will teach you to talk royally. The Guisarts, all your people, and yourself, cannot compel a Potter to bow down to images of clay.'

The girls were burnt, and a few months afterwards, at eighty years of age, Palissy died in the Bastile.

We need add little concerning the character and attainments of the remarkable man whose eventful history we have thus imperfectly sketched. Palissy lived himself. Everything therefore that he did was an illustration of his character. Never did the outer and inner man in any representative of mere humanity more perfectly correspond each to the other. He could not live a lie. He was always in harmony with himself. Nothing falsified him to the world. Nothing misrepresented him. Next to his wonderful perseverance this is the most prominent stamp set upon his history. To deceive was unnatural to him, as unnatural as it was to conceal. The whole truth, therefore, always came out. And his clear and scrupulous sense of duty never appears to have forsaken him. Whether in prosperity or adversity, he followed it without deviation. Like the sun-flower, which turns its face to the god of day, whether clouds obscure the rays of its countenance, or it shines in undimmed brightness upon its servant, Palissy faithfully trod in the way and commandment of Him whom he devoutly recognised as his God and Saviour. A simple and earnest piety characterised all his acts. He was a steward of God, and this idea seemed to be, as Mr. Morley remarks, the mainspring of all his actions.' He was constantly recurring to the duty of every one, according as he had received gifts, to distribute them to others.' Mr. Morley, with that just appreciation and affectionate faithfulness with which he ever speaks of the Potter, has very beautifully brought out this feature of Palissy's character:

-

"The Parable of the Talents-the duty of every man placed in the world to see how he might turn all his powers to account, and do the utmost good of which his mind was capable-was the touchstone by which Bernard tried the temper of his industry. This religious feeling, aiding and strengthening his natural activity of mind, forced Palissy to pursue with energy every path by which he thought he could arrive at truth. He never remained satisfied with what was done, for there was always more to do. He laboured ever forward in art; he studied nature, not as a recluse, but as a man ready to seek every opportunity of turning his discoveries in science to the practical advantage of his race. He saw that if men kept honest local records, history would be