St. Austell and Carclaze owe their prosperity, in the origination of all these things, to William Cookworthy, who first discovered china-clay in England. He has his memorial in Plymouth, where he lived for many years, for one of the fine series of modern stained-glass windows in Plymouth Guildhall shows him as chemist and porcelain-maker; but the landowners of Carclaze and the people of St. Austell have certainly fallen short of their duty by failing to set up a statue of him in some prominent place.

William Cookworthy, a native of Kingsbridge, in South Devon, was born in 1705, one of the seven children of another William Cookworthy, a weaver, who died early and left his widow and family with very narrow means. They owed their sustenance, and the children owed their education, to the Quakers of Kingsbridge. William was apprenticed to a chemist and druggist, and eventually established himself in the same way of business, wholesale, at Plymouth. The firm of Bevan & Cookworthy prospered early, and Cookworthy at thirty-one years of age very largely freed himself from its cares and devoted himself to preaching. Ten years later, in 1745, he became interested in kaolin, or china-clay, which until 1708 had been found only in China, giving that country the entire output of porcelain, which from the land of its origin obtained its very name of "china." Cookworthy, in common with several other of his contemporaries, wished to produce "china," and when news came in 1745 that china-clay had been found in Virginia, he commissioned a Quaker friend to obtain some for him. Travelling much in Cornwall, he himself discovered a coarse variety of it on Tregoning Hill, in Germoe, and a little later found the great deposits at Carclaze, in the parish of St. Stephens, behind St. Austell.

In that year, 1758, he began experimentally making porcelain at Plymouth. Already, in 1709, Dresden china was being made from the kaolin found in Saxony, and a little later than his own beginning the Sèvres porcelain factory was using a deposit found at Limoges. He was joined by Lord Camelford, and a patent for making china was obtained in 1768, but the Plymouth factory was not at any time remunerative, and the works were removed to Bristol and eventually into Staffordshire. Cookworthy died in 1780, not in any way advantaged by his discovery.

The town of St. Austell—"Storsel," locally—does not in the least know how it came by that name. An altogether uncertain "Augustulus" has been presumed, while others think they find glimmerings of a hermit "St. Austolus." It is a town of narrow, crowded streets, with little of interest apart from the fine parish church, chiefly of the early part of the fifteenth century. The font, however, is Norman, of the very marked Cornish type, consisting of a bowl supported on four legs ending in grotesque faces. The fine Perpendicular tower and the south aisle, richly carved in the stubborn granite with numerous shields and devices bearing the emblems of the Passion and Crucifixion, are among the most ornate in Cornwall.

A mysterious inscription, whose meaning is still hotly debated, is found above the west door, immediately surmounting a sculptured group representing the "pelican in her piety." The old story of the pelican wounding her breast—"vulning herself," ancient writers call it—for the sustenance of her young, is here thought to typify the sacrifice made by our Blessed Lord and Saviour for our sakes; and in this light the inscription above may be read. The rudely sculptured letters of it form the words and initials—

KY CH (or RY DU)

INRI

The original view was that RY DU was the correct rendering, signifying in the Cornish language "God is King." Of the meaning of INRI there can, of course, be no question; it is "Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judæorum." It is now sometimes held that, as the lower line is Latin, the upper is Greek, and is a contraction for Kyrius Christus, i.e., "Christ is Lord." Yet other attempts take us into the Syro-Phœnician and Hebrew tongues, and read the meanings, "Dearly Beloved," or, "He gave us His blood." But no one will ever definitely put the question to rest.

There is but one other really interesting object in St. Austell. That is the famous, but mysterious, Mengu, or Menagu, stone, removed of late from the Market Place to the spot known universally in St. Austell (but not officially named), as "Fool's Corner." It is placed, or was placed, it is said, where the boundaries of the three manors of Trenance—Austell, Treverbyn, and Towington—met. A brass plate fixed upon it in 1892 gives a certain modicum of information respecting this slab, but it is little enough, and to this day the words written by Walter White, in his "Londoner's Walk to the Land's End," of 1854, hold good. "Enquire," he says, "for anything remarkable in the town, and you will hardly fail to be told of the Mengu Stone, regarded with some veneration by its possessors because no one knows anything about it." But is not that precisely the reason why so many things are venerated? There is something of the sublime in the mere vague importance of this stone, from which proclamations and announcements of local public events have from time immemorial been made, and it is as important to St. Austell as the famous stone of Destiny from Scone, now in the Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey; the stone on which the ancient Scottish kings were, and our own monarchs now are, crowned.