It prevented him from growing up to the active vigorous
English workman, possessed of all his limbs, and knowing right well the
use of them; it put him upon considering whether, as he could not be
that, he might not be something else, and something greater. It sent his
mind inwards; it drove him to meditate upon the laws and secrets of his
art. The result was, that he arrived at a perception and a grasp of them
which might, perhaps, have been envied, certainly have been owned, by an
Athenian potter. Relentless criticism has long since torn to pieces the
old legend of King Numa, receiving in a cavern, from the Nymph Egeria,
the laws that were to govern Rome. But no criticism can shake the record
of that illness and mutilation of the boy Josiah Wedgwood, which made
for him a cavern of his bedroom, and an oracle of his own inquiring,
searching, meditative, and fruitful mind.

From those early days of suffering, weary perhaps to him as they went
by, but bright surely in the retrospect both to him and us, a mark seems
at once to have been set upon his career. But those, who would dwell
upon his history, have still to deplore that many of the materials are
wanting. It is not creditable to his country or his art, that the Life
of Wedgwood should still remain unwritten. Here is a man, who, in the
well-chosen words of his epitaph, "converted a rude and inconsiderable
manufacture into an elegant art, and an important branch of national
commerce." Here is a man, who, beginning as it were from zero, and
unaided by the national or royal gifts which were found necessary to
uphold the glories of Sevres, of Chelsea, and of Dresden, produced works
truer, perhaps, to the inexorable laws of art, than the fine fabrics
that proceeded from those establishments, and scarcely less attractive
to the public taste. Here is a man, who found his business cooped up
within a narrow valley by the want of even tolerable communications,
and who, while he devoted his mind to the lifting that business from
meanness, ugliness, and weakness, to the highest excellence of material
and form, had surplus energy enough to take a leading part in great
engineering works like the Grand Trunk Canal from the Mersey to the
Trent; which made the raw material of his industry abundant and cheap,
which supplied a vent for the manufactured article, and opened for it
materially a way to the outer world. Lastly, here is a man who found
his country dependent upon others for it