Other artists are in training in the same school, painting on japanned tin-plate or metallized paper for their canvas. The Old Hall is the most interesting manufacturing establishment in the Black Country for its antecedents and associations, and well worth visiting for the beautiful ware it produces.
I next visited the manufactory of the Messrs. Loveridge and Co., who carry on the same trade on a still more extensive scale. They employ between 400 and 500 persons, and one would think, on looking at the prodigious stock of articles ready for the market, that they could alone supply a large and growing nation. I was told that this stock was worth at least £60,000, embracing articles used in the first stages of civilization. The stamping-rooms show the progress of machine-force in the manufacture of the larger wares. Not long ago the hand-mallet or hammer worked up these various forms with continuous din of the gold-beater's strokes. But now you see in one of these large shops two parallel rows of fall or stamp presses working by steam, on the principle of the pile-driver. Some of these falling stamps weigh a ton, and they make powerful impressions on the plate of sheet-iron, placed over the lower die, at the first stroke. The iron must be of the first quality to stand this process without breaking or straining the grain of the surface. The best has
