Through billows Atlantic to steer,
As he bends o'er the wave
Which may soon be his grave
Remembers his home with a tear."
It is not a happy sentiment and suggests more the landsman's views of the sea than those of the sailor. The following has a truer ring, but it was not put on jugs to be sold to sailors' wives:—
"Go patter to lubbers and swabs, d'ye see,
'Bout danger and fear and the like;
A tight water-boat and good sea room give me,
And it ain't to a little I'll strike."
Platinum or Silver Lustre.—It is not definitely known who was the first potter to adopt this decoration. Obviously it could not be earlier in date than the year that platinum was discovered as a new metal. Its chemical individuality and qualities were established by the successive researches of Scheffer (1752), Marggraft (1757), Bergmann (1777). In 1784 the first platinum crucible was made by Achard. In 1800 Knight, of London, published all that was known concerning the use of platinum in manufacture. Thomas Wedgwood, the youngest son of Josiah, employed it as early as 1791, but it is claimed that John Hancock (born 1757, died 1847), first employed gold, silver, and steel lustres at Messrs. Spode's factory at Stoke for Messrs. Daniel and Brown, who were decorating Spode ware at that date. That is his own account when he was eighty-nine years of age. But he was employed at Etruria. At any rate Hancock did not retain the secret, for among contemporary potters John Gardner, of Stoke, Sparkes, of Hanley, and Horobin, of Tunstall, seem to have practised it. At the beginning of the nineteenth century other potters were making lustre. In 1804 John Aynsley, of Lane End, and in 1810 Peter Warburton, of Lane End, who took out a patent for "decorating china, porcelain, earthenware, and glass with native pure or unadulterated gold, silver, platina, or other metals fluxed or lowered with lead or any other substance which invention or new method leaves the metals, after being burned, in their metallic state."