In the history of European glass the culminating point is perhaps reached in the Venetian glass of the first half of the sixteenth century—I am speaking, of course, from the artistic point of view. For a century or more after this time our history is concerned with little else than the spread of the Italian methods of manufacture and decoration over the west of Europe. After the middle of the seventeenth century the interest becomes more and more centred in the technical and economical improvements in the manufacture. The invention of plate-glass by the French, in England the use of coal instead of wood in the glass-furnace, and the adoption of a heavy fusible type of glass containing lead (an indirect consequence, perhaps, of this change of fuel)—these are the really notable points in the history of the first century of industrial advance. After the middle of the eighteenth century England takes a more and more important position, and the prominent question was the production of a glass of high technical excellence at a greatly reduced price. Preoccupied as we were at that time with the absorbing interest of this industrial revolution, less attention was given in this country to the artistic side in the manufacture of glass.

In the sixteenth century the interest of our subject centres in the story of the emigration of skilled glass-workers from Venice and from L’Altare, and in the more or less complete replacement of the old methods, as these Italians found their way into nearly every corner of Western Europe. It was technically the victory of the carefully prepared cristallo over the old mediÆval verre de fougÈre or wald-glas. From another point of view the revolution was but one phase in the spread of the Italian renaissance. In fact, in one respect it was distinctly a renaissance, for the glass of Venice in composition differed little from that made during the Roman domination: it belonged essentially to the great Mediterranean family of soda-lime glass, prepared, if not from sea-weed, at least from maritime herbs. On the other hand, the indigenous glass which the cristallo replaced was almost without exception of forest origin, a potash glass made from the roughly lixiviated ashes of beechwood or bracken.

I have said that these Italian glass-workers carried their new methods all through Western Europe, but, as we shall see, their permanent influence was not the same in each case. In Germany it was in a measure but a passing fashion—neither the Italian designs nor the Italian methods of manufacture ever became prevalent. The wald-glas, in an improved form certainly, held its own, and indeed before the end of the next century was threatening the supremacy of its Venetian rival.

In France, on the other hand, the victory was in a manner complete; the old verre de fougÈre, it is true, long survived, but in an acknowledged position of inferiority. In the Netherlands the case was more complicated; for while on the one hand at Antwerp and at LiÉge the typical Venetian cristallo was more successfully imitated than elsewhere out of Italy, on the other hand, in many places in the Low Countries, the old green glass continued to be made, and the old shapes, above all the essentially Teutonic roemer, never fell out of favour. It so happens indeed that for the best renderings of examples of both these schools of glass we must go to the works of the Dutch and Flemish painters, rather than to the contemporary pictures of either Germany or Italy. This is an interesting point about which I shall have something more to say later on.

As regards Spain, the Italian influence became on the whole predominant, but here the question is complicated by the existence, in Catalonia at least, of a school of enamelled glass of which the Venetian origin is by no means certain, and this school was already well developed before the end of the fifteenth century. Finally, in the case of our own country, the Venetian emigrants who came for the most part by way of the Low Countries, had soon to divide the hitherto almost free field with glass-workers from Normandy and Lorraine.

It is only of late years that the full significance of this emigration of glass-workers from Murano and from L’Altare has been recognised. A distinguished Belgian antiquary, M. Schuermans, President of the Cour d’Appel at LiÉge, about the year 1880—following in this in the steps of his countryman the late M. Alexandre Pinchart, and in a measure also in those of M. Houdoy (Verrerie À la faÇon de Venise, Paris, 1873)—began a systematic investigation of the subject, and during a period of ten years, from 1883 to 1892, contributed to the pages of a learned periodical published at Brussels (Bulletin des Commissions Royales de l’Art et de l’Industrie) a series of letters—for so M. Schuermans modestly called them, though they were in fact so many treatises, extending some of them to more than a hundred pages—packed full with the results of his researches. One of the most curious sources of information M. Schuermans found in the reports sent from the Venetian embassies and agencies in France and elsewhere to the Council of Ten at Venice. It was not the least important duty of the diplomatic agents of the Republic to trace out the fugitive Muranese glass-workers, to endeavour to induce them, by threats or promises, to return to their homes, and if unsuccessful in this, to denounce them to the authorities in Venice, who might then proceed to throw into prison the unhappy families of these recalcitrant workmen. In extreme cases there are hints of more drastic measures in dealing with the traitors themselves—for so they were regarded—but I do not think that any instance of assassination has been definitely made out for the time of which we are now speaking. It is certainly strange that the only known cases of such judicial murders occurred at Vienna as late as the eighteenth century. The story was told long ago by Daru in his Histoire de Venise (PiÈces Justificatives), and I do not know that it has ever been refuted.

Not that these extreme measures were at all times carried out with equal energy. At times, for political or other reasons, little restraint appears to have been put upon the wandering forth of the Muranese glass-workers; while at others the Council of Ten seems to have regarded the question as one of the utmost moment, aroused perhaps by reports that seemed to prove that the glass monopoly of the state was endangered. This was the case at the end of the fifteenth century, again towards the middle of the seventeenth, and more especially at the end of that century, when the Venetians began to find their industry seriously threatened by their German rivals.

In the sixteenth century, as a contemporary writer puts it, ‘Tous les rois et princes dÉsiraient et affectaient avoir en leurs royaumes cette science’: that is to say, the knowledge of the methods of preparing the true cristallo. To obtain this knowledge from Murano was difficult and even dangerous. What wonder, then, that recourse was had to the Consuls of the glass-workers’ guild at L’Altare? These officials seem to have been always ready to negotiate for the supply to foreign princes, or even to private individuals—if the requisite payment was forthcoming—of one or more of their skilled gentleman glass-workers.^[165] But in this case, too, a keen eye was kept upon these men: they were bound by the strictest oaths to practise their craft, when in foreign lands, with the greatest secrecy; above all they were forbidden to take any apprentices from the people among whom they were working. In France, where so many of these Altarists settled, these restrictions were the cause of constant friction, but so successfully were they as a rule enforced, that we find that, in the case of more than one centre of the new industry, it was necessary during a period of at least a century to have recourse from time to time to the original source at L’Altare, to replace the Italian workmen who had died or wandered off to other towns. For like their rivals from Murano, these Altarists were always on the move. We are reminded in this of the wandering porcelain ‘arcanists’ of the eighteenth century, who carried from one German court to another the secrets of their craft. To give but a single example; M. Schuermans has traced one of these gentilshommes de verre in migrations that led him successively to London, LiÉge, Maestricht, Rouen, and Paris.

In what respect, if in any, did the glass manufactured by these ‘licensed’ craftsmen from L’Altare, differ from that made by their rivals the ‘outlaws’ from Murano? This is a question that we are not in a position to answer. That there was some difference in style of working, and not merely in the technical excellence of the glass, would seem to be proved by the expression ‘À la faÇon d’Altare,’ or ‘ad uso d’Altare,’ so often applied to it. There is no doubt that the glass made ‘À la faÇon de Venise’ was, on the whole, regarded as of greater excellence, and that in the impossibility of obtaining workmen from Murano, the resort to the Consuls at L’Altare was in a measure a pis aller. We must not, however, as has sometimes been done, look upon the craftsmen from the latter town as incapable of producing anything of artistic merit. On the contrary, they not only turned out a true cristallo, but much of the enamelled glass that was so successfully made in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came in all probability from furnaces worked by Altarists.

In fact, our ignorance on this point affords an excellent example of a difficulty that is met with again and again in this history of ours,—the difficulty, I mean, of controlling our literary material by means of the scanty examples of glass that have come down to us. It would require a large shelf in a library to hold all the bulky volumes dealing with the history of French glass that have of late years been published, works that are due above all to the local patriotism and the industry of provincial investigators. For books of this kind, the fashion was set as long ago as 1864 by M. Benjamin Fillon in his L’Art du Verre chez les Poitevins. Since then have appeared not mere brochures, but in many cases portly volumes tracing the history of the manufacture in Normandy, Picardy, Lorraine, Nevers, Lyons, and Provence. M. Schuermans has devoted to France a long letter, chiefly concerned with the settlements of Altarist workmen (op. cit., vol. xxxi.). And yet not only are specimens of glass, undoubtedly French, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comparatively rare, but in very few cases can anything more than a guess be made as to the provinces to which these specimens are to be attributed. Such attributions indeed, when attempted, have for the most part had to be based either upon the armorial bearings forming part of the enamelled decoration, or again upon the localities where the glasses have been found—and these are criteria that fail in most cases.

Among the many anomalies that we encounter in the course of this inquiry—and surely in no kindred branch of art history are so many met with—there is nothing more surprising than the numerous important ‘developments’ of glass of one kind or another, for which we may search in vain a rational explanation—unless, indeed, it is the corresponding fact of the unexplained barrenness of certain periods and countries where such poverty would have been the least expected. One source of this apparent caprice in the presence or absence of glass of artistic merit at times and at places where the contrary might have been looked for, may be found, perhaps, in the fact that although, since Roman days at all events, the making of glass has always been an important industry, it is an industry that has only incidentally come into connection with the Æsthetic movements of the time.^[166] Some such explanation may perhaps be given for the comparatively subordinate place taken by France in the history of artistic glass, at least until quite recent days. In one department of the vitreous arts the French occupied no doubt for a time the premier place—the stained glass of their cathedrals is acknowledged to be the finest in Europe. But in our branch of the manufacture, a branch for which, curiously enough, the French alone have provided a name—la verrerie—that nation has never occupied a prominent position. Since Roman times, the first place as producers of glass vessels of artistic importance has been held in succession by Byzantine Greeks, by Saracens, by Venetians, by Germans, and for a moment by the English. It is only quite of late, since the commencement of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in fact, that any claim for such a position could be made for the French. And yet, in spite of this, the literature of that special subdivision of the arts du feu with which we are here concerned is especially a French one, and this is true not only for the technical and industrial side of the subject, but for the artistic and historical in an even greater degree.

I have spoken of the determined way in which these wandering Italians kept themselves apart from the native workmen, so that the secrets of their craft were preserved through more than one generation. In time, however, in France at any rate, not a few of these Italian craftsmen became sedentary, and not the least curious result of the recent researches by French and Belgian archivistes has been to show how certain well-known families of glass-makers from L’Altare settled down in various parts of France, where their representatives may now be found, many of them still engaged in the same work. So that, thanks to these investigations, the Saroldi of L’Altare have been provided with distant cousins in the Sarode family of Poitou; in similar manner the Ferri are represented by the Ferry of Provence, great glass-masters at the present day; the Massari by the Massary of Lorraine; and the Bormioli by the Bormiolles of Normandy and the Nivernais. All these four families were admitted long since to the noblesse of France^[167] (Schuermans, Letter XI., 1892).

It is difficult to form any definite idea of the nature of the craft secrets of these Italians. It can hardly have related to the more obvious materials employed, for as early as 1555 (and it was only about the year 1548 that the great emigration of the Altarists began) the Oriental soda, the rocchetta of Neri, which was brought by Venetian galleys from Alexandria, had in France been already displaced by the Spanish soda or barilla, a material that has held its place until recent times. This barilla was made from the famous soda plant, the Salsola sativa, which, we are told, was grown from seed in various parts of the province of Murcia, and exported from the adjacent port of Alicante. So again the quartz pebbles from the bed of the Ticino, so highly prized by the early Venetian glass-makers, were early replaced by the pure white sand of Étaples.^[168]

There is, however, in this connection, one point worth notice. It is impossible to prepare a workable glass from quartz and alkali alone; the presence of a certain quantity of lime is essential. Now in the forest glass—the verre de fougÈre—sufficient lime (or equivalent bases) is provided by the impurities in the crude potash employed; but this is no longer the case when the more carefully prepared Oriental or Spanish soda takes its place: it is now necessary to supply additional lime. It is not impossible that the secret of the shrewd Italians may have lain in this direction.

When speaking of the mediÆval glass of France, I have brought forward some evidence to show that, by the fourteenth century at least, vessels of glass must have been produced in large quantities for domestic use. This of course was, without exception, verre de fougÈre, essentially the glass of the people, which for long was little influenced by the new Italian methods. It was this glass chiefly that was hawked round the country by itinerant vendors. Their cry was well known in Paris—‘Gentils verres, verres jolis—À deux liards les verres de pierre!’ Others, as in old days at Rome (see the quotation from Martial on p. 82, note), collected broken glass to the cry of ‘ChambriÈres, regardez-y!—Voirre cassez, Voirre cassez!’^[169] Bernard Palissy, writing towards the end of the sixteenth century, gives but a mean idea not only of the hawkers, but of the makers of glass in his day:—‘Je te prie, considÈre un peu les verres qui, pour avoir estÉ trop communs entre les hommes, sont devenuz À un prix si vil que la plupart de ceux qui les font vivent plus mÉchaniquement que ne font les crocheteurs de Paris ... et ces verres sont venduz et criez, par les villages, par ceux mÊmes qui crient les vieux chapeaux et les vieilles ferrailles’ (quoted by Gerspach, p. 193).

It was only when the secrets of the pure cristallo and the application of enamels were introduced from Italy that glass began to take a more honourable position in France. We cannot safely trace back the foreign influence to an earlier date than the middle of the fifteenth century, and it was not brought into full play till just a century later.

The name of RenÉ, ‘king of Sicily and Jerusalem,’ and ruler under various titles in Provence, Anjou, and Lorraine, was at one time a name to conjure with in matters connected with art and literature, above all in the south of France. Of late years there has been a tendency to strip this much harassed king of many of his claims to distinction as a patron of the arts. There seems, however, every reason to connect his name with the introduction of the finer sorts of glass into France, not, of course, of the industry as a whole, though even this was at one time claimed for RenÉ. There is evidence to show that as early as 1443 a member of the Ferro family^[170] of L’Altare was working for him at Goult, in Provence. This would be the earliest instance known to us of Italian glass-workers in France.

King RenÉ, we are told, presented to his nephew Louis XI. some pieces of glass ‘molt variolÉs et bien peincts.’ But we can hardly refer to so early a date the beaker of enameled glass formerly preserved at Aix, painted inside with the kneeling figure of the Magdalen by the side of her Master, so arranged that the former was only visible when the cup had been drained; so that, as the inscription quaintly expressed it:—

It was but a few years later, in 1448, that the famous charter of which a nearly contemporary copy has fortunately been preserved, was granted to certain glass-workers in Lorraine by Jean de Calabre, governor of that duchy in place of his father, King RenÉ. In this document we have early evidence of the claim of the glass-workers to the rights of gentlemen.^[171] Full recognition is given to the ‘plusieurs beaux droitz, libertez, franchises et prÉrogatives, et dont eulx et leurs prÉdÉcesseurs ayant joui et usÉ de tous temps passez et estÉ tenus et rÉputez en telle franchise comme chevaliers estimez et gens nobles dudit duchiÉ de Lorrainne.’ Then follows a list of all these privileges, not the least important being the exemption from ‘toutes tailles, aydes, subsides, d’ost, de giste et de chevaulchiÉes quelconques.’

This is by no means the earliest French document in which the claim to some kind of nobility is made for the profession. As far back as the later thirteenth century, in the reign of Philippe le Bel, the glass-workers of Champagne claimed similar rights, basing their pretensions on certain edicts of Constantine and on others found in the Theodosian Code! Charles VI., whose interest in the manufacture of glass has been already referred to (p. 137), in his Lettres Royales of 1399, granted important rights to the glass-makers, ‘À cause de la noblesse du dict mestier.’ These privileges, however, were confined to those whose ancestors had followed the craft for several generations.

But for all this, these poor ‘gentilshommes de verre’ never obtained that complete recognition in France that had always been granted to their brother craftsmen at Venice and L’Altare, and their claims at times exposed them to ridicule. There is an often-quoted epigram, directed against one of their number (it is probably by FranÇois Maynard, a follower of Ronsard), which well expresses the popular feeling with regard to their position—

The question of these gentilshommes verriers was fully discussed by the late M. Garnier in his book upon glass (La Verrerie, p. 174 seq.), and he quotes passages from contemporary documents to show both the extent of the claims and the ambiguous position actually held by these needy gentry in the eighteenth century. At that time they were still always referred to as gentilshommes, and they vindicated their social status by fighting duels among themselves. Their position, however, was often very wretched, less so, indeed, in Normandy than in Lorraine, where the competition of the Germans was so keen. It is a significant fact that at the Revolution they as a body joined the party of the ÉmigrÉs, and actually petitioned M. D’Artois to enrol them in a special corps. One point is clear: the profession of glass-worker was at all times in France open to the nobility, and this, of course, was not the case with other crafts and trades.

This long digression upon the position of the glass-workers in France was started by certain expressions in the charter granted to the glass-makers of Lorraine by the son of King RenÉ. Not a little interest attaches to the production of this eastern district; its history, as concerns glass, differs from that of the more essentially French provinces.^[172] Here the Italians, whether from Murano or L’Altare, appear to have had little influence. In Lorraine, as in the lower Rhine country and in the bishopric of LiÉge—closely related districts—the making of glass had probably been carried on continuously from Roman times. In the Ardennes, and especially in the forests of Argonnes and in the Vosges, the manufacture early took on a purely industrial character. At the end of the sixteenth century it was claimed by the glass-makers of the last district that they supplied Switzerland, the Low Countries, and England with glass; and we shall see later on that it was from glass-workers from Lorraine, more definitely from the western Vosges, that we in England learned so much in the later sixteenth century. These Lorrainers owed their chief fame to their skill in making window-panes and mirrors, and the old tradition may be held to be still carried on in the great glass-works at Baccarat, near LunÉville.

I have no space to follow the working of the new methods in Poitou and in the south, but a few words may be said of the glass-houses established at Nevers in the sixteenth century. At that time the dukedom of the Nivernais was held by the Gonzaga family of Mantua, who had already acquired the marquisate of Montferrat, upon which the town of L’Altare was dependent. Louis of Gonzaga, who died in 1595, was as a patron of the arts quite abreast of his time, and we may note that besides his possessions in France and Italy he held much land in Flanders and the LiÉge country, and that he was married to a princess of the house of Cleves. The old town of Nevers became for a time an artistic centre of some importance. In the handsome renaissance palace built in part by this said Louis (his arms are to be seen carved in bold relief on the walls), there is now gathered together an important collection of the enamelled fayence for which the town is famous, and also a few examples of the local glass, but none of this last is, I think, of so early a date as the sixteenth century. Altarists had doubtless come to Nevers before the time of the Duke Louis, but it was during his rule that the Saroldo family settled here, a family famous especially for their skill in the use of glass enamels. To the Saroldo succeeded the Ponta family; and in the seventeenth century Jean Castellano came from LiÉge: in addition to these Altarists, Venetian workmen were employed at times. It is, indeed, a noticeable fact that here in the very centre of France these glass-works should, for something like two hundred years, have been dependent upon Italian workmen.

The glass of Nevers acquired some general renown in the seventeenth century. Thomas Corneille, the younger brother of the great dramatist, calls the town a ‘petit Murane de Venise,’ and praises the ‘variÉtÉ des divers ouvrages de verre qui s’y font et qu’on transporte dans toutes les provinces de la France.’ In this case—quite exceptionally as regards France—we can associate a special genre or application of glass—a somewhat trifling one, to be sure—with the local glass-houses. In the already mentioned museum in the Ducal Palace may be seen some of these ‘gentillesses a’Émail propres À orner les cabinets, les cheminÉes et les armoires.’ Here may be found landscape scenes with cows and shepherdesses built up of fragments of glass of various colours,—these childish compositions are apparently executed with the blow-pipe. We are told in the journal of Jean HÉroard, the physician to Louis XIII., that when that king was a child he amused himself with certain ‘petits chiens de verre et autres animaux faits À Nevers.’ Among the scanty specimens of French glass in the British Museum are some quaint little figures, about four inches in height, built up of coloured glass enamels. We see there a little statuette of Louis XIV. strutting along attired as a Roman emperor; there is another of St. James the Apostle. These characteristic examples of verroterie may very plausibly be referred to the glass-blowers of Nevers at the end of the seventeenth century^[173] (Plate XXXV. 1).

The province of Normandy has played a not unimportant part in the history of glass. It was from the Norman duchy and from Brittany, according to the tradition preserved at L’Altare, that the glass-workers wandered forth in the tenth or eleventh century to find a more peaceable home at L’Altare, in the mountains above the Ligurian coast. As early as the year 1302 we hear of the famous glass-house at La Haye, in the forest of Lyons, near Rouen. This is in a charter which mentions incidentally the bracken, the ‘feucheriam ad faciendum vitrum’—for all this early glass was, as I have said, verre de fougÈre—which was to be cut only at specified times. It was here, about the year 1330, that Philippe de Cacqueray is said to have first made the plasts de verre, otherwise known as verre de France,^[174] for long the most important product of the Norman glass-houses. These plasts were indeed merely small sheets of glass, with a thickening or ‘bull’s-eye’ in the centre; they were made by the familiar ‘spinning’ process, which, however, must surely have been known before the fourteenth century. In any case this verre de France was widely exported at a later time, and much of it must have found its way into England.^[175] It would appear that the gentlemen of the grosses verreries where this window-glass was made, held their heads above those of petites verreries which turned out only ‘hollow ware,’ and this fact would point to the outcome of the latter works not being of a very superior kind. If, however, we may judge from the examples reproduced by M. Gerspach (L’Art de la Verrerie, figs. 104-113) from the collection of M. le Breton, who has done for Norman glass what M. Fillon has done for that of Poitou, the table-ware made in Normandy during the seventeenth century possessed no little artistic merit, and what is more, it had a cachet of its own.

In the seventeenth century, however, the history of glass in France centres round the manufacture of plate-glass by the new process of coulage or casting. After the middle of the century a demand arose in France for large sheets of clear glass, not so much for windows, it would seem, as for the tall mirrors that were now coming into fashion, and again for the portiÈres of the ‘glass-coaches’ of the nobility. Colbert, the great minister of the early and glorious days of Louis XIV., was in despair because the large panes of glass suitable for these purposes had to be obtained from Venice or from Nuremberg. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish a colony of Muranese workmen in Paris, Colbert had recourse to a Norman family of glass-makers, the De NÉhou, who had lately succeeded the De Cacqueray at Tourlaville, near Cherbourg. It was in 1675 that Louis Lucas de NÉhou was put in charge of the royal glass-works at Paris, where he perfected his great discovery of the method of casting glass. He was able to turn out sheets of unprecedented size by a process in which the ‘metal’ was poured upon frames, spread out evenly by rollers, and subsequently polished.

The Manufacture Royale des Glaces was removed in 1693 to the ChÂteau de St. Gobain, not far from Laon. The St. Gobain works have for two hundred years held a pre-eminent position in Europe for the manufacture of plate-glass. This subject of plate-glass is indeed a little outside our limits: for the student of the architecture and the decorative arts of the eighteenth century it is, however, one of no little importance.

I have been able to do little more than select a few examples that have seemed to me of especial interest from the well-filled records of the French glass-workers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many important centres have been passed over without comment,—Nantes, for instance, frequented above all by the Altarists; and Poitou, the source, according to M. Fillon, of many of the finest extant examples of French enamelled glass. In both these districts members of the Saroldo family settled—in Brittany they were prominent for over two centuries.

In Paris, or rather in the Isle de France, the glass-works of St. Germain-en-Laye were for a time under direct royal patronage. It was there, soon after 1552, that Teseo Mutio made for Henri II. ‘verres, myroirs et canons.’^[176] Although the king pronounced Mutio’s work to be equal to that of the Venetians, these glass-houses had but a short life.

In 1604 a special commission was appointed in Paris to deal with the difficulty that arose from the obstinate refusal of the Altarists to teach the French apprentices the secrets of their craft. It was proposed to get over this obstacle by the naturalisation of the Italians, but to judge from the continued importation of fresh batches of foreigners, this measure had but little practical result.

But what examples, it may be asked, can we point to that would throw light on the nature of the glass made during these centuries by this succession of Italians, to say nothing of the production of the native gentilshommes? Nowhere in France, as far as I know, is there to be found anything in the nature of a representative collection to illustrate the history of native glass. The nearest approach is no doubt to be discovered in the scattered examples in the Louvre, and above all in the HÔtel de Cluny, where there are many curious specimens of the French enamelled glass of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It is to the Venetian enamelled glass of the fifteenth century, to the goblets of the coppa nuziale class, that we must go back to find the prototype of what is by far the most interesting family of French glass. In France these verres À pied, enamelled with portrait-heads or symbolical figures, continued in vogue well into the seventeenth century, long after the fashion for such work had passed away at Venice. The enamelling itself on this French glass is not remarkable for brilliancy, but there is often some native verve in the treatment of the figures, and a true Gallic ring about the mottoes and verses that accompany them. Of these ‘devises, souhaits, proverbes, dÉdicaces, vers et maximes,’ we may distinguish two classes: in the one case they are of a more or less gallant character, or contain personal references; in the other a religious sentiment or a pious quotation is found, generally of such a nature as to suggest that the original owner belonged to the reformed church. It is sometimes difficult nowadays to seize the connection between the device and the subject which it accompanies. Thus on a fine stemless goblet in the MusÉe de Cluny we see three halberdiers standing as on sentry duty; the accompanying motto, ‘En la sueur de ton visaige tu mangeras le pain,’ has been interpreted as referring to the hard life of the soldier. Of a more gallant character are the figures and devices on a goblet of yellow enamelled glass in the British Museum (Slade, No. 824). A gentleman in the costume of the time of Henri II. offers a flower to a lady with the remark, ‘JE SUIS A VOVS.’ The latter—she holds a padlocked heart in her hand—replies ‘MÕ CUER AVÉS.’ In addition to these figures we see a goat (bouc) drinking from a vase, and this we may connect with the inscription that encircles the bowl—‘JE SVIS A VOVS JEHAN BOUCAU ET ANTOYNETE BOUC.’ This is doubtless a marriage cup, and the name Boucau points, it is said, to a ProvenÇal origin.

As in our country, though in a somewhat less degree, the Gothic feeling in design lingered long in France, at least in the more remote provinces. An enamelled glass basin, preserved in the museum at Rennes (figured by M. Gerspach, p. 199), bears round the margin in large Gothic letters the words—PRION ? DIEU ? QUI ? NOUS ? PARDON ? 1597. On the ground of the style of decoration, to say nothing of the lettering, this bowl might well, in the absence of the date, have been referred to the fifteenth century.

Perhaps the oldest example that has been preserved of this French enamelled glass is the tazza in the Cluny Museum, with the arms of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany. This cup must date from the early years of the sixteenth century.

There is one variety of enamelled glass, Venetian in its origin, which we in England generally associate with France, although there are scant references to it in the French authors who have described the glass of their country. I refer to the ‘splashed’ glass, an old method of decoration indeed, for we have found something very like it on certain little unguent vases of the ancient Egyptians. In the present case the enamels—red, yellow, blue, and white—lie in oval masses on the surface, reminding one in some cases of the sections of the pebbles on a piece of polished pudding-stone. How these enamels were splashed on to the unfinished paraison has been already described (p. 64). I may add that the little barrel-shaped flask (the barillet or bariz of the old writers) to which this decoration is sometimes applied, is a characteristic French form.

Among the French glass in the British Museum may be seen some little scent-bottles or burettes of moulded glass, decorated with fleurs-de-lis in relief. These are generally attributed to a certain Bernard Perrot of Orleans, to whom, in 1662, extensive privileges were granted by Colbert. We are told by a contemporary writer (Abraham du Pradel, Livre Commode, 1691) that this Perrot imitated agates and gems as well as the porcelain of China, and that he cast his glass into moulds to obtain bas-reliefs and other ornaments. This early reference to the copying of porcelain by means of opaque white glass is of some interest. I do not know what precise source has been found for the little cups of this milky glass of which there are some examples among the French glass in the British Museum—they are painted with a rudely executed floral decoration of a somewhat Oriental type—but they may without doubt be connected with one of the many attempts made at this time or somewhat later to imitate the porcelain of the Far East. This opaque white French glass should be compared with a very similar ware made at Barcelona, of which something will be said in the next chapter.