Excerpt from The Wedgwoods: Being a Life of Josiah Wedgwood: With Notices of His Works and Their Productions, Memoirs of the Wedgwood and Other Families, and a History of the Early Potteries of Staffordshire Yielding to no one in love for the beautiful in Art and in Nature, or in veneration for whatever is great and good and noble in the human family, the preparation of the life of the man whose works are pre-eminently entitled to be classed with the former, and whose whole life and character so imperatively demand for him a proud place amongst the latter, has to me been a "labour of love," and one in which I have taken more than usual delight. The task has been one of serious labour, but fully commensurate with that labour has been the pleasure I have felt in prosecuting and completing my task. To me, in literary matters, it has ever appeared that the heavier the toil, the pleasanter will be the result. There is, in my opinion, but little credit and less satisfaction in accomplishing a work which takes no trouble. It is the hard literary digging - the throwing up of heavy spadesful of soil, in the hope of finding even one little bulb which may germinate and add its beauties to those that are already garnered or are yet to come - which brings with it enjoyment and satisfaction. It is but small merit to compile a work from data and materials ready "cut and dried" to ones hand. It is the getting together of those materials that constitutes the credit, and brings with it a gratifying reward. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.