Chapter XXII: Contemporary Glass (3)

A goblet of similar character, with the date 1584, was not long since
smashed to pieces while on view at a saleroom. Like the goblet
mentioned in the text, this glass was attributed to Verzelini.

Footnote 238:

As to the other specimens of Elizabethan glass mentioned by Mr.
Hartshorne—the chalice-like cup belonging to Mr. Woodruff and the
tazza now at Windsor—they have doubtless been long in England, but
there is nothing to prove their English make. They are both
essentially of forms borrowed from the goldsmith, and like the glass
dish in the Williams Library at Gordon Square, they may well have
come from Henry VIII.’s collection.

Footnote 239:

Although the _Metallum Martis or Iron made from Pitt-coale_ was not
printed till 1665, Dudley had experimented with coal some time before
1619. As early as 1612, in a treatise entitled _Metallica_, Simon
Sturtevant, who had already taken out a patent for making iron with
pit-coal, states that ‘very lately’ green glass for windows, of good
quality, had been melted with that material at Winchester House,
Southwark.

Footnote 240:

The most important of these documents are given in full in the
Appendix to Mr. Hartshorne’s _English Glasses_.

Footnote 241:

On the other hand, Howell in a letter dated March 18, 1618, quoted in
part below, speaks of Mansell as working his patent with ‘My Lord of
Pembroke and divers others of the prime Lords of the Court.’ He had,
it would seem, replaced the early adventurers and schemers by men of
wealth and of influence at court.

Footnote 242:

Beside the passages quoted above there are many references to glass,
including an interesting account of Murano, to be found in his
_Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ_. Howell edited these early letters of his while
confined (for debt, it would seem) in the prison of the Fleet, at the
time of the Civil War. We may note among other things a reference to
a ‘curious sea-chest of glass,’ and again we hear of a lady writing
to Murano for ‘a complete cupboard of true crystall glass.’

Footnote 243:

He got this comparison, doubtless, and a good many other stories that
we find in his Venetian letters, from Garzoni’s _Piazza Universale_,
or from Fioravanti’s _Specchio_, books most popular at that time,
from which I have already quoted when speaking of the glass of Murano.

Footnote 244:

These are little cylindrical vessels for burning tallow. The name
survives as an equivalent to a night-light.

Footnote 245:

I am not sure, however, that when at this time the word nitre is
found we are always justified in understanding by it saltpetre or
nitrate of potash.

Footnote 246:

_Greene-Morelli Correspondence_, Sloane MSS. Mr. Hartshorne has
reproduced eight of these letters (_English Glasses_, Appendix
xxix.), and has devoted three plates to the reproductions of Greene’s
patterns.

Footnote 247:

The same may be said of the treatise on _The Art of Glass_ by
Haudicquet de Blancourt, of which the English translation appeared in
1699. There is little or no advance on Merret in this book, and
nothing is said of the application of lead-glass to hollow ware. An
interesting plate showing the implements used by the glass-blower
may, however, be found here.

Footnote 248:

The term originally corresponded to the _verre à pierres_ of the
French. It was used in opposition to the ‘green glass’ or _verre de
fougère_, in the preparation of which sand was used.

Footnote 249:

The confusion is increased by the fact that on the Continent the term
‘cristal’ was now transferred to the lead-glass.

Footnote 250:

This was the Ravenscroft who took out a patent in 1674, and together
with an Altarist, a De Costa (the sole representative of that
Ligurian town, says Mr. Hartshorne, that we meet with in English
records), made glass from calcined flints, nitre, and borax. There is
certainly no question of lead in this case.

Footnote 251:

Mr. Hartshorne, I should add, while acknowledging that there is no
definite allusion to the use of lead in any document of the
seventeenth century, traces an indirect reference to it in a patent
taken out by one Tilson as early as 1663; in this document, however,
I can find nothing pointing in that direction.

Footnote 252:

The new financial methods are well illustrated in the quotation from
Houghton on p. 318.

Footnote 253:

In this work there are more than a hundred quarto pages devoted to
the eighteenth-century drinking-glasses. Perhaps of greater interest
to the ‘average man’ is the information given in the final chapter
concerning the liquids drunk from these glasses, to say nothing of
the apt quotations from old letters throwing light on the social
habits of the time to be found in the notes. Another vast series of
eighteenth-century glasses, more than seven hundred in number, I
believe, has been collected by Mr. J. Webb Singer, chiefly in the
neighbourhood of Bristol. These are well illustrated in a paper by
Mr. E. Wynn Penny in the _Burlington Magazine_ (Sept. and Nov. 1903).

Footnote 254:

In the earlier pre-renaissance glasses, the foot was folded over
_from below upwards_. It was the Venetians who first introduced the
downward fold of the welted base.

Footnote 255:

This drawn-out ‘blow,’ or inverted tear, is often found in the stems
of the solid tavern glass of the first half of the eighteenth century
(Hartshorne, p. 265).

Footnote 256:

Mr. Hartshorne, however, thinks that our English workmen, especially
at Bristol, were capable of turning out opaque-twisted stems as good
as, if not better than, those made in Holland. On the other hand, the
stems with interlacing ruby and white threads, so characteristic of
the latter country, never form part of typical English glasses.

Footnote 257:

The famous Royal Oak glass, with the portrait of Charles II., now
belonging to Mr. Festing (Hartshorne, Plate 29), is certainly a case
in point, whatever may be the origin of the glass itself. But this
goblet is scratched with a diamond.

Footnote 258:

The latter inscription refers of course to the famous forty-fifth
number of Wilkes’s _North Briton_ (April 1763). The ‘No Excise’ may
be associated with the successful agitation against Walpole’s bill in
1733-34, or perhaps rather with later protests of the same nature.

Footnote 259:

For these glasses see especially the twenty-fourth chapter of Mr.
Hartshorne’s often-quoted work, not neglecting the most interesting
notes.

Footnote 260:

It must be remembered that ‘James III.’ did not die until 1766; his
‘reign’ of sixty-five years exceeded that of any other English
prince. Although most of these Jacobite glasses date from a period
rather after than before ‘the ’45’ there was still a long interval
during which the attribution I have suggested would be justified.

Footnote 261:

This house has remained in the hands of the same family since the
time it was built by Walter Jones, in the reign of James I.

Footnote 262:

This period of English glass is not represented in the British
Museum. It is well illustrated in the collection of Mr. C. E.
Jerningham, and there are some fine examples among the more
miscellaneous glass of Mr. FitzHenry now (1906) on view at the
Victoria and Albert Museum.

Footnote 263:

I have purposely gone to older works for these technical details,
that is to say, to works written before the general introduction of
modern mechanical processes; for example, to Apsley Pellat’s
_Curiosities of Glass-making_, and to the treatise on glass by Porter
in Lardner’s series (1832). For the _materials_ used in England in
the eighteenth century see Dossie’s _Handmaid of the Arts_, 2nd
edition, 1764.

Footnote 264:

This is the more strange, as in all the recipes of the time for
making the white enamel, even in one relating apparently to this very
Bristol glass, arsenic plays an important part.

Footnote 265:

Dossie, in his _Handmaid of the Arts_, 2nd ed., 1764, tells us that
at that time much white opaque glass, in imitation of porcelain, was
made near London. The glass, he states, was rendered opaque by tin,
by antimony, or by arsenic. Much of this material was doubtless
employed for enamelling on metal.

Footnote 266:

Chardin was a French dealer in precious stones who supplied the Shah
with European jewels. The materials for the account of Persia from
which the extract given in the text is taken, were collected during a
voyage in that country in the years 1671 and 1672. Chardin, who was
of an old Protestant family, settled later on in England and was
knighted by Charles II. I quote from the English translation of 1724,
checking it by the contemporary French edition.

Footnote 267:

At Vienna, in the Museum for Art and Industry, there is a small
collection of glass from Hebron. Besides the bangles of opaque glass
which belong to the old primitive family, there are some small
vessels of a deep amber-coloured glass similar to that brought from
Rhodes, and finally a few vases of Persian type of a bluish-green
metal; among the last group may be found some lamps with glass tubes
similar to those mentioned in the text.

Footnote 268:

The miscellaneous beads, found chiefly in the neighbourhood of
Benares and Cawnpore, are associated for the most part with Buddhist
remains of the time of the Gupta dynasty, which reigned in Northern
India shortly before our era, but very few of these beads are of
glass. Of great interest are the spindle-shaped beads, decorated with
intersecting lines of enamel—black, grey, or white—on a ground of
quartz, or sometimes of carnelian. A series of these beads may be
seen in the ‘Gallery of Religions’ in the British Museum. They are
described by Mrs. J. R. Rivett-Carnac in the _Journal of Indian Art_,
vol. ix.

Footnote 269:

At the Indian Exhibition held at Earl’s Court a few years ago, some
of these Indian glass-makers were at work in a little hut, and here
the native processes could be watched.

Footnote 270:

Through the kindness of Mr. Forrest, ex-Director of Records at the
India Office, I have been enabled to examine a collection of small
glass vessels obtained by him in the Kaira district of Guzerat. Among
them I noticed some graceful little cruet-shaped ewers of a pale
pinkish glass—the colour apparently obtained from gold—and also
some glass lamps of rounded conical form similar to those used in
Cairo.

Footnote 271:

My chief authorities for the early history of Chinese glass are the
works of Dr. Hirth, especially a paper on the subject in his
_Chinesische Studien_, and some casual remarks in Dr. Bushell’s
_Oriental Ceramic Art_. [I have at the last moment been able to add a
few notes to what I have written, based on the chapter on glass in
Dr. Bushell’s _Chinese Art_. June 1906.]

Footnote 272:

Thus we have the statements of the missionaries Ricci and Du Halde,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, that the
Chinese made glass. As far back as the twelfth century, the Arab
writer Edrisi speaks of glass-workers in the Chinese town of Djan-ku,
wherever that may be.

Footnote 273:

Dr. Bushell, however, thinks that there is evidence that in the fifth
century glass of Indo-Scythian origin reached Northern China by way
of the great trade route through Chinese Turkestan. About the same
time it was brought from the West, by the sea route, to the southern
capital (the modern Nanking). The manufacture was at that time
established in both North and South China, and ‘has been carried on
with indifferent success ever since’ (_Chinese Art_, vol. ii. pp.
60-61).

Footnote 274:

The very absence of native enamelled glass might indeed be used as an
argument against the otherwise plausible theory that it was from the
Saracenic glass that the Chinese first learned how to enamel their
porcelain with fusible colours over the glaze. See on this point my
book on Porcelain in this series, p. 87. Dr. Bushell mentions ‘the
recent discovery in mosques of the western provinces of China of a
number of hanging lamps of characteristic shape, enamelled in
colours,’ with Arabic motives and script. Some of these have been
taken to America. _Chinese Art_, vol. ii. p. 69.

Footnote 275:

Hu succeeded in splitting up the character with which his simple name
was written into the two ideographs Ku and Yueh, and thereupon
adopted the more imposing title ‘Chamber of the Ancient Moon.’

Footnote 276:

This collection is described in the _Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst_,
vol. xx., in an article on Chinese glass by Herr A. Bapst.

Footnote 277:

Dr. Bushell hints that such inscriptions may in cases have been added
by modern curio-dealers in Pekin, as a bait to European collectors.

Footnote 278:

As arranged now at South Kensington, the carved glass may be compared
with the companion series in agate and other stones.

Footnote 279:

Dossie, in his _Handmaid of the Arts_ (2nd ed., 1764), declares that
there was at the time he was writing a great demand in China for ‘the
brown Venetian glass with gold-spangles, called the Philosopher’s
Stone.’

Footnote 280:

The making of glass is still an important industry at Poshan, where
the native quartz-rock is melted with saltpetre. Window-glass,
bottles, and lanterns are made, and the clear glass is exported in
the form of long rods tied up in bundles. Williamson’s _Journeys in
North China_, vol. i. p. 131.

Footnote 281:

See, for confirmation of this, the previous note. In China to-day the
word _liao_ has replaced the older names for glass. For the better
kinds of work the Shantung glass is worked up at Pekin—this is the
_Ching liao_. Bushell, _Chinese Art_, vol. ii. p. 63.

Footnote 282:

I have to thank Professor Church for the results of an analysis of a
snuff-bottle ‘like nearly white jade or milk-quartz faintly
greenish.’ It contained lead-oxide, 48·3 per cent.; potash, 8·8 per
cent.; soda, 1·1 per cent.; and silica, 41·5 per cent. We have here a
remarkably pure potash-lead glass, for only 0·2 per cent, of alumina
and iron oxide was found. The specific gravity of this specimen was
3·8; that of another bottle of clear strong green glass was 3·7.

Footnote 283:

In some of the Imperial tombs of the sixth and seventh centuries of
our era glass jars have been found. One of these is described as of
white glass ornamented with round knobs. In the grave of the Emperor
Nintoku (fifth century) were found fragments of blue and white glass.
It is very unlikely that any of this glass was made in Japan.

Footnote 284:

Now in the British Museum; it is referred to on p. 152.

Transcriber's Notes

Dashes used to represent duplicated entries in the Index have been replaced by the text they represent.

Some presumed printer's errors have been corrected. In particular, punctuation has been normalized. Spelling in the Index has been corrected to match the spelling in the main text. Additional corrections are listed below with the text as printed (top) and the corrected text (bottom):

might have have been
might have been (p. 255)

of that of European origin three is no need to speak
of that of European origin there is no need to speak (p. 342)

Lorraine was was not yet
Lorraine was not yet (Footnote 172)