We may probably regard the reign of William III. as the turning-point in the history of our English glass as in so many other of our minor arts. It is to that period that one must assign the first beginnings of our modern industrial life,^[252] and it is in the Dutch influence, at that time so dominant, that the principal stimulus is to be found.

Of the window and mirror glass of the period a most interesting series is preserved at Hampton Court. Many of the panes of the windows facing the garden faÇades of the palace are strongly tinged with purple, a result of the process by which the colourless protoxide of manganese is reconverted into the purple bin-oxide under the influence of sunlight. Placed between the windows in William III.’s state bedroom are some curious mirrors with frames ornamented with appliquÉ plates of deep blue glass carved into patterns and monograms. Observe, too, a charming mirror of the same period over the fireplace in this room.

It is, however, still difficult to point to surviving examples to illustrate the vessels of English glass made about this period. Certain covered bowls (such as that reproduced by Mr. Hartshorne on p. 238 of his great work) may date back to the end of the seventeenth century. The same author gives an illustration of a fine posset-pot with quilled handles, preserved at Chastleton. This bowl, decorated with roses, masks, and berry-like prunts, may be as old as Charles II.’s reign. When one calls to mind the picturesque pottery—the slip-ware—that was made at the time, it would seem not unlikely that in the local glass-houses something similar may have been attempted in glass.

We have, of course, plenty of glass wine-bottles, a few of which may date as far back as the reign of Charles I. These bottles are mostly of a black impure glass and of a globular form, squat and compressed at the sides, reminding one of the leather botel from which our word bottle is derived. Similar bottles are found in the Low Countries, and they may often be seen in Dutch pictures. The introduction of the practice of bottling wine, as far as England is concerned, is generally connected with Sir Kenelm Digby, that universal genius who, in the reign of Charles I., was occupied with so many branches of the arts. Drinking-bottles of this description, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are often dug up while excavating the foundations of houses. An extensive collection, chiefly of local origin, may be seen in the Guildhall Museum, and Mr. Hilton Price has a representative series derived also from excavations in the city. The surface of these bottles is often covered with an iridescent scale giving them an appearance of great age. A circular stamp bearing the maker’s name is sometimes found on the shoulder, but these stamped bottles are in all cases, I think, of later date. There is a small collection of these stamps in the British Museum.

I have already pointed out that during the reign of Charles II. the prevalent form of the drinking-glass was still of the old Venetian type. The stem was almost non-existent; it was at best represented by a spherical bulb connecting the two cones—the upper one often truncated, the lower very shallow—that formed respectively the bowl and the foot. In the Spanish Netherlands, before the end of the century, another form became prevalent: the stem now assumes more or less a baluster form, divided from the bowl by a distinct shoulder; the knop of this stem is often hollow, and generally duplicated. In some cases a silver coin is found lying loose in this hollow bulb. Such a form we may perhaps regard as the starting-point for the vast and varied series of English drinking-glasses which constitutes the principal element in a collection of English glass.

Since the drinking-glass forms so important a part in the history of our native glass, perhaps it may be well to turn for a moment to consider the process by which a vessel of this sort is made, the more so as we are told by a high practical authority that in the manufacture of a wine-glass every principle of glass-blowing is illustrated (H. J. Powell, Principles of Glass-making, 1883). Wine-glasses, says Mr. Powell, may have either a ‘straw shank or stem’ pulled out from the substance of the bowl itself, or more often a ‘stuck shank’ made from a separate piece of glass subsequently added to the bowl; again, the foot may be either blown or cast.

I will take as an example a wine-glass with a ‘straw shank’ and a blown foot. ‘The glass for the bowl is first gathered and blown to the required shape. Upon the centre of the base of the bowl, which is still attached to the blow-pipe, a small quantity of molten glass is skilfully dropped from the end of a working rod [the pontil]. Part of the added glass is formed into a small button by the grip of the spring tool [procello], and the residue is pulled out into the stem. In the meantime a smaller bulb has been blown and its extremity fixed to the end of the stem from which the button has previously been removed. The smaller bulb is severed in the midst and the cup-shaped remnant adhering to the stem is reheated, opened by the insertion of one point of the spring tool, and by rapid rotation thrown out into a disc or foot by the agency of centrifugal force.’ The pontil is now attached to the foot by means of a seal of molten glass, and the upper bulb (the future bowl of the glass) ‘wetted off’ from the blowing-tube by the application of a moistened iron. The glass, held by the pontil attached to the foot, is completed by reheating the severed edges of what is now the bowl, cutting them even with the shears and rounding them by a second exposure to the fire. The now completed wine-glass is finally separated from the pontil by a jerk and taken to the annealing oven. A rough edge remaining where the pontil was attached is at the present day invariably smoothed by grinding; not so, however, in the case of the older glasses, and this is a point to be noted by the collector. In Germany and Bohemia the rough edge of the bowl after shearing is ground even on the wheel instead of being rounded off in the furnace, and foreign-made glasses may be often distinguished by their more angular rim.

We shall now be in a better position to attack that extensive and complicated series, the drinking-glasses of the eighteenth century. Mr. Hartshorne, who in his Old English Glasses^[253] has treated the subject in great detail, mentions incidentally that he has made more than a thousand full-sized outlines of glasses that have passed through his hands. We must be content, then, to accept the classification of such an authority, although some of the divisions may seem a little arbitrary to one who has no claim to be an expert. Thus out of sixteen families of English eighteenth-century glass there are only two that contain any objects other than drinking-glasses in the narrower sense of the word; again, four or five of the groups are based chiefly upon the liquor—wine, beer, mead, mumm, syllabub, cider, cordial water, or punch—that these glasses were presumably made to contain. In a division of glasses from this latter point of view I shall only mention three heads which alone seem to me of sufficient importance to merit separate treatment—wine-glasses, glasses for ale and beer, and glasses for cordial waters—and even these, though varying in size, pass through the same series of shapes in bowl and stem. Again, a cross division may be made distinguishing the ruder and somewhat more solid household and tavern glasses from those destined for the table of the wealthy.

The main lines, however, of the classification of these drinking-glasses must be based upon the form of the bowl and upon the outline and construction of the stem. But first a word may be said of the relation of our eighteenth-century glasses to their predecessors and contemporaries on the Continent. On the whole, one may conclude that the new forms and methods of decoration grew up in Holland, in the Spanish Netherlands, or again in the LiÉge district, towards the end of the seventeenth century, when the old Italian influence was giving way to processes and schemes of decoration that had their origin in Germany and Bohemia. The methods of the great firms of the Bonhommes and the De Colnets were above all eclectic; the opaque-twisted stems of their glasses were essentially of Venetian origin, the engraved bowl had its prototype in Germany, and the material finally—the ‘metal’—before long was English.

In the case of the English glasses that followed in the same lines, the greatest care seems to have been given to the metal employed; next to that, the construction of the stem and the outline of the bowl received attention; on the other hand, the engraving on the bowl, compared to the contemporary work in Germany and the Netherlands, was for the most part of a summary, not to say rude character. As for the foot, the margin was generally slightly ‘welted’ or folded over from above, so that the glass stands only on the rim; by this the solidity of the foot is at the same time increased.^[254] Otherwise the only variation of importance in the shape of the foot depends upon its greater or less flatness; in the earlier glasses the central part generally rises up to form a dome, upon which rests the base of the stem. The square bases with plinth-like steps belong to a much later time and are generally associated with facetted ware. It may be noted that the glasses of the eighteenth century stand on the whole on a relatively wider foot than those now made.

The first point of importance in considering the stem is to distinguish those that are drawn—these are the ‘straw-shanks,’ formed of the same piece of metal as the bowl—from the ‘stuck-shanks’ that are made of a separate piece of glass. The latter form by far the larger class. As regards the outline, the stem may be either a plain rod or cylinder, or again of baluster shape—this last but a modification of the double knops that constitute the whole shank of some seventeenth-century glasses. In other cases the stem is marked by spiral lines in relief—that is to say, it is ‘rib-twisted,’ or, finally, it may be cut into flat facets. But perhaps the most important division of the stems of our English glasses is that based upon the nature of the spiral lines of greater or less complexity so generally found in the interior of the cylinder of glass. These lines may be formed either by strings or bands of opaque white, or more rarely of coloured glass, or again by empty threads formed by drawing out a bubble of air. These are the opaque-twisted and the air-twisted stems respectively.

If now we turn to the outline of the main division of the glass, the bowl, this has been made the basis of a division that classes these bowls as straight-sided, waisted, bell-shaped, and finally, bowls with a curve resembling either the ogee or the double ogee of the architect.

The air-drawn stem, if not an English invention, was certainly brought to great perfection here at an early period. We must seek the origin of this device in the large ‘blows,’ often of very irregular shape, that fill the knop or bulb on the stems of earlier glasses.^[255] This ‘blow’ is sometimes prolonged into a sort of tail which passes down nearly to the foot. In other cases we find several smaller ‘tears’ in the same bulb, formed, it appears, by puncturing, while it is still soft, the little mass of glass destined to form the bulb, and then covering it with a second gathering. These air-beaded stems are mostly of Low Country origin; but they are of interest to us, as we may probably regard them as the starting-point of the air-twists which are formed by drawing out and twisting the original spherical mass, containing one or more of these bubbles or tears. It may be mentioned that in a general way a loose, widely spaced spiral is characteristic of the earlier glasses, while the tightly twisted stems are only found on late examples. This applies also to the spirals on the rib-twisted stems of plain glass. There is another point that should not be overlooked: this is that the twist on eighteenth-century glasses always descends from right to left, while in modern imitations the reverse direction is generally taken.

Perhaps the earliest type of English glass is one with a waisted bowl, engraved with a full-blown rose, and supported on a rib-twisted stem; but those on stems loosely air-twisted may sometimes be as old.

There is a glass in the British Museum with a bell-shaped bowl engraved with a rose, a pink, and a third flower of undetermined species; this we may take as a good type of the earlier drinking-glass. The bowl is divided from the air-twisted stem by a hollow bulb containing a sixpence of Charles II. dated 1679. It will be noted how closely the berry-like stamps on the bulb resemble the prunts on the stem of a roemer; they occur again on the already mentioned posset-cup from Chastleton. Such decoration may, perhaps, be regarded as characteristic of the English glass of the end of the seventeenth century.

The opaque-twisted stem formed, on the same system as the Venetian vetro di trina, from rods containing threads of opaque white glass or latticinio, is on the other hand not a specially English type. Such stems were in great favour in the Low Countries and in the north of France, and it is even possible that the rods of glass from which our English examples are formed may have been imported from Venice or from the Netherlands.^[256] The white lines are sometimes combined with air-twists to form complicated patterns.

The glasses with straight-sided bowls may, on the whole, be attributed to an early period, and together with the contemporary bell-shaped glasses they constitute an essentially English class. Those again with the so-called ogee bowls are especially associated with the Bristol glass-houses. Glasses with bowls of this outline form nearly one-third of the extensive collection of Mr. Singer, which was formed for the most part, as I have already mentioned, in the neighbourhood of that town.

I now turn to the engraved designs that are found upon the bowls of most of these eighteenth-century glasses. There is not much to be said for the inventive powers or for the technical skill shown by the engraver. Indeed, considering the general low level of the engraved work, there is some temptation to find a Dutch or Flemish origin for any specimen of engraving that shows superior technical or artistic qualities; and there is little doubt that in the case of the earlier pieces at least, such an attribution would be justified.^[257]

The design that we find most frequently on our eighteenth-century glasses is a rose branch with, on the opposite side, a butterfly. This motive is found on the bell-shaped bowls of early glasses with air-twisted stems. With certain modifications it continued long in use. The rose, with the change of fashion after the middle of the century, became more naturalistic, and the butterfly often takes the form of a moth. Other designs have reference to the beverage destined to be drunk from the glass: for wine-glasses, bunches of grapes and vine-leaves (often accompanied by a humming-bird); ears of barley for beer-glasses; and in the few rare cases where an apple-tree forms part of the design, we may associate the glass with cider. The popular cries—‘No Excise,’ or ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ and ‘No. 45’—which are sometimes found on glasses towards the middle of the century,^[258] remind us of the new fashion that came in about that time of finding in the decoration of pottery or other ware an opportunity for political propaganda, and for the glorification of the hero of the day. There was not much to be done in this way on the restricted space at command on the bowls of our glasses; towards the end of the century, however, naval emblems are frequently to be found, and the Nelson glasses form a group by themselves.

But of all the glasses that are thus ‘made to speak,’ to use the expression of the great Napoleon, who had strong opinions as to the advantages of this method of political rÉclame, the most interesting class is formed by the treasured Jacobite glasses, bearing mottoes and emblems of a more or less cryptic character, or, more rarely, portraits of the young or the old Pretender engraved on the bowl.^[259] The extraordinary fascination exercised over some minds by what George Borrow used to call ‘Charlie-over-the-waterism,’ is nowhere better exhibited than in the almost devotional tone with which this subject is approached by more than one of our authorities. The more important of these glasses, especially the large ones with drawn stems, and those with baluster or rather double-knopped stems, are probably of foreign origin; at all events they were engraved in the north of France or in the Low Countries. Of the rare examples with the head of the young Pretender surrounded by a wreath of laurels, there are very few specimens in our public museums: I can only call to mind a small glass from the Schreiber collection at South Kensington and one or two examples lately presented to the British Museum (Plate XLIV.). The most frequent emblem is the rose with two buds, traditionally, I believe, regarded as symbolical of James II. with his son and grandson, although to one not in the inner circle of the cause the relation of the equipoised buds to the central flower would seem rather to point to the old Pretender and his two sons Charles Edward and Henry.^[260]

As to the inscriptions on these glasses, we find in one instance four stanzas from the Jacobite version of ‘God save the King’ engraved on the bowl. But in most cases the allusion to the cause is of a more disguised character. The commonest of all is the single word ‘Fiat,’ the motto of the Jacobite society known as the Cycle, which flourished in the west of England during the greater part of the eighteenth century.

I may note that among the Jacobite glasses treasured up in many an old house in the west and north of England, one rarely comes across any example that cannot be classed more or less accurately as a wine-glass. Quite exceptional is the decanter engraved with a circular compass-card pointing to a star, between oak leaves and roses (Hartshorne, Plate 64). This decanter is one of a pair preserved, along with as many as eleven of the above mentioned ‘Fiat’ glasses, in the early Jacobean house at Chastleton, on the borders of Oxfordshire and Worcestershire.^[261] Here also are many other pieces of old English glass to more than one of which I have already referred.

Although the history of English glass during the eighteenth century—it would be more accurate perhaps to say from about 1670 to 1770—tends always to fall back upon the drinking-glass, yet during that time the material was applied also to the manufacture of many other objects. We find in the earlier records frequent reference to large vessels of glass, blown or cast; this was indeed the case as far back as the time when Chiddingfold was the centre of glass-making. A favourite form at the end of the seventeenth century—but here again a drinking-glass—was the ‘yard,’ an exaggerated outgrowth of the Venetian or Low Country ‘flute.’ Thus Evelyn, describing the ceremonies on the occasion of the proclamation of James II., says that at Bromley the king’s health was ‘drunk in a flint glasse of a yard long.’ Some time before this, in 1669, on the occasion of a visit to the glass-house at Blackfriars, the same writer mentions the ‘singing glasses’ that he there had made for him, and which ‘make an echo to the voice ...’ but ‘were so thin that the very breath broke one or two of them.’ At a later time trumpets were made of glass, and some of these have survived.

But few examples, however, of what may be called miscellaneous glass of an earlier date than the seventies of the eighteenth century have been preserved. It was about this time that a great change must have come over the manufacture, though on this point we have strangely little direct information. This period, we know, was a critical one in the history of the minor arts both in England and in France. In the latter country, the simpler and more classical style associated with the reign of Louis XVI. replaced the more unrestrained forms of the Louis Quinze period some years before the death of the latter king. In England we see the new shapes first in the work of the silversmith about the year 1770, and soon after they are well represented in the Chelsea-Derby porcelain. In the case of glass this change is above all to be associated with the increased use of facetting. Flat facets divided by obtuse angles may indeed be found at times on the stems and shoulders of drinking-glasses almost from the commencement of the century. But now these facets take a purely geometrical form. The dishes and basins of the time simply bristle with sharp-pointed pyramids, so that these heavy, solid vessels can scarcely be lifted with impunity.

Now for the first time full advantage was taken of the power possessed by the heavy lead-glass of dispersing the rays of light, for only by the use of these facets was the full fire of the glass developed. This is indeed—so at least it seems to me—the one really important period in the history of English glass. It was not long after this time, towards the end of the century, that use was for the first time made of machinery for driving the grinding-wheels. The glass, whose general outline had been previously determined in the mould, was now quickly channelled with intersecting furrows. There is at South Kensington a small collection of the earlier facetted glass, presented by Mr. H. B. Lennard, which contains some pieces of real artistic merit. This was the period when the square plinth-like base was in fashion—not perhaps in itself a very desirable form. In the Lennard collection are two carved cups with these square feet: the bowl in each case is surrounded by deeply cut gadroons curving as they descend; on other parts the usual facets are found (Plate XLV. 1). There is a fine sculpturesque feeling about the treatment of these standing cups that carries one back to far earlier days—in fact I know of no other specimens of English glass where such full advantage has been taken of the qualities of the material, and this without any abuse or exaggeration.^[262]

But for the most part—above all after the end of the century—the facetting runs wild; sometimes it covers the whole surface, and even where there are no facets the ground is marked out by rectangular divisions. The decoration as a whole is mechanically executed. But even this machine-made work is better than the cheap imitations of later days produced by pressing the glass into moulds of metal.

The cutting, or rather the grinding, of the glass was effected on a cast-iron wheel. A number of these wheels were fixed on a horizontal shaft; a workman seated in front of each held the glass against the revolving face. The actual abrading in such a case is done by the gritty particles of the sand, which mixed with water falls in a continuous stream from the hopper above. After smoothing on a stone wheel, the surface was polished on a wheel or ‘lap’ of willow-wood (or sometimes of lead), first by means of pumice or rotten stone and then with putty powder. Engraving, in the Bohemian or German sense, held a subordinate position, and when made use of, for the better sort of work at least, foreigners were generally employed. The outlines were then cut by minute copper wheels with the aid of finely pulverised emery powder mixed with oil, as in the case of the German glass.^[263]

As I have said, it was above all this facetted ware—‘l’article Anglais, solide et comfortable mais sans ÉlÉgance,’ as a French writer calls it—that spread the renown of English glass through the length and breadth of Europe.

At that time the famous English flint-glass was made by mixing three parts of pure sand, well washed and burned (from Alum Bay, Lynn, or Reigate), with two parts of red lead or litharge and one part of carbonate of potash. A small fraction of saltpetre and a little oxide of manganese were subsequently added to cleanse the metal. The potash, up to the middle of the last century, was introduced in the form of pearl-ash imported from Canada or Russia, and the litharge came from the refineries where silver was extracted from the native lead. In fusing the glass, great importance was attached to the quick melting of the materials at the full heat of the furnace, and to the subsequent rapid working of the pot. Our English glass industry was nearly ruined by the enormous excise duties, collected on the most arbitrary and artificial system, to which it was subjected both before and after the close of the great war. When on the repeal of these taxes the industry ‘rose from its ashes,’ it was conducted on a purely commercial basis.

I have already called attention to the important part played by Bristol in the manufacture of glass during the eighteenth century. That town obtained at this time a unique distinction in the history of English glass, as the one spot where a distinct kind of ware—a special genre—was made. It cannot be precisely stated when the opaque white glass decorated with enamel colours was first made at Bristol; what record we have does not take us further back than the latter half of the eighteenth century. This glass was apparently very brittle, and would not stand heat, a fact which may account for the few examples that have survived. In general character the Bristol lattimo closely resembles the other imitations of porcelain made with glass, which were so much in vogue at the beginning of the century. I have already mentioned the opaque white glass of Orleans, of Barcelona, and of Venice. Mr. Hugh Owen has collected at the end of his excellent work on Bristol porcelain (Two Centuries of Ceramic Art in Bristol, 1873) some curious information about this glass, from the account-book of a local enameller, one Edkins. The ledger in question contains entries from 1762 to 1787. According to an analysis made by Professor Church, the opaque Bristol glass contains an exceptionally large quantity of lead—as much as 44 per cent., it would seem—and, what is certainly remarkable, less than one per cent. of tin. It is to this substance, however, seeing that neither phosphate of lime nor arsenic^[264] is present, that we must attribute its opacity.

Mr. Owen thinks that in whiteness and in softness of texture this Bristol ware exceeds all other opaque glasses of the kind, and comes nearer than any of them in aspect to the soft-paste porcelain of the day. According to the papers left by the above-mentioned Edkins, the better kinds—these were above all tea-poys, enamel-painted in the manner of the contemporary Bristol porcelain—were decorated in the usual way with coloured fluxes melted on in the muffle-stove. But the common articles ‘were simply painted with oil colours mixed with a desiccator and dried hard by artificial heat.’^[265]

In the Schreiber collection at South Kensington may be seen a pair of candlesticks with twisted stems made of this white opaque Bristol glass. They are well painted with flowers and butterflies on a white chalky ground. At a later time some passable imitations of Venetian glass decorated with white threads in a ruby ground were made at Bristol, as well as bottles splashed with purple, black, and white, after the manner of a French and Venetian ware of the seventeenth century that has already been described. The glass-works at Nailsea, nine miles south-west of Bristol, were established in 1788 and survived to the middle of the last century. To the earlier years of these works may be attributed some jugs of yellowish-green glass, with large splashes of white, that turn up at times in the west of England.

James Tassie (born 1735), the Glasgow stonemason, applied the experience he had gained in the modelling of portrait heads in wax to the reproduction of antique gems in coloured pastes. The bright colours of these compare unfavourably with the delicate hues of the glass intaglios that have come down from classical times. But Tassie, both James and his nephew William, also made portrait medallions of a comparatively large size, using a nearly opaque glass paste or frit, more or less resembling porcelain. This paste was formed, it is said, of ‘a finely powdered glass and finely powdered pigments, annealed by being placed in a reverbatory furnace.’ This is a substance of some interest to us, and we may perhaps find in it points of resemblance to the ‘pÂte de verre’ employed lately by M. Henri Cros (see Chap. XXII.).

I can only mention one other local variety of glass. In Ireland, towards the end of the eighteenth century, more than one attempt was made to encourage the manufacture. Some large fruit-dishes of heavy cut-glass, and others in the form of open baskets adorned with festoons, have been traced back to glass-houses established at Waterford about the year 1780. This glass is distinguished by a more or less faint blue tinge derived from a minute quantity of cobalt in the ‘metal.’ The gilding that was largely applied to these vessels was burned in by means of borax, and where the gold has come away the surface of the glass is rough and pitted.