Setting forth to collect old glassware, therefore, what general guides may the beginner use, and what reliable tests can he apply?

There are seven: (1) the tint of the glass; (2) the sound of the glass; (3) the quality of the glass metal (or material); (4) the weight; (5) the signs of use and wear; (6) the pontil-mark; and (7) the workmanship.

These seven suffice to equip the beginner. But as he collects and gains experience, many details and developments of them will come to his knowledge, which I shall refer to in their place.

It should be remembered that there are no maker’s marks to go by in glass, as there are in porcelain, earthenware, Sheffield plate, or pewter; and no signatures, as there are in paintings, drawings, and etchings.

1. THE TINTS OF OLD GLASS

Old glass is darkly brilliant. It is not whitely crystal as modern glass is; the eye can only see what it looks for, ever, and to uninstructed eyes all glass is merely glass-colour, but the experienced collector sees that there are many different tints and tinges in the crystal of glass. These tints and tinges are the chief guide, test, and principle by which one judges whether a piece of glass is one of the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, or seventeenth century, as the case may be.

To judge the tint, place the piece of glass upon a white tablecloth, near to a tumbler or decanter known to be modern because of recent purchase from an ordinary vendor of household glass. The eye, looking for it, will then notice in the two pieces of glass a striking difference of tint, if one of them is old, that is; the old piece is not only darker than the white of the tablecloth, but darker than the piece of modern glass. And the darker (or sootier) its tint the older the glass, as a rule. Tint or tinge is a constant feature in old glass, and an obvious feature directly the eye knows what to look for. Varieties of dark tint may be detected, and by these varieties the bit of glass may be dated, its period determined, and its age assigned.

If you place near each other, upon a white damask cloth, a glass of Charles II date, a William and Mary glass, a George III glass, and a Victorian glass, you will notice a darkening and then a whitening in tint (though not a brightening) as your eye travels from the oldest glass to the most modern. By “tint” or “tinge” I do not mean “colour,” in the sense of red or green or blue; I will deal with coloured glass later on. By “tint” or “tinge” I mean the shade of leaden, darkish hue in the metal from which the glass article was blown or moulded. This tint or tinge was inherent in the molten glass, before shaping and cooling began. The metal or raw material was mixed according to recipe—each glassworks had its own recipe—and one of the materials was lead. The older the Georgian glass, the more impure the metal—that is, the fuller of lead oxides—and therefore the darker; what are called improvements in glass-mixing have gradually eliminated the oxides, and therefore the leaden tint or tinge also; it is astonishing how many different shades and tinges of darkness (in that sense) a cabinet of old glass can show. In a few glasses the bowl is pale sapphire or aquamarine colour, the stem being the tint of plain glass.

The glass collector exercises his sight and applies the test; it enables him to detect a counterfeit, though in shape and general appearance it imitates the genuine antique; it is too whitely crystal, too tintless to be old. Curio-shop windows at Brighton, for instance, are full of frauds in glass, chiefly cut-glass, or glass moulded to resemble cut-glass; but the chalky-white tint betrays and condemns them, and the instructed collector will not be taken in. Also he will recognize genuine Waterford glass by its own tinge of colour, and genuine Cork glass in a similar way; he will see that old Dutch-made glass, when thick, has a smeary, milk-and-watery tint, and when thin has a flashy, meretricious absence of deep tinting: he will learn that old Stourbridge glass was whiter than antique Bristol or Newcastle glass, and sometimes was milky-white; in course of time and practice he will come to be able to “date” and “place” a piece of old glass at sight, as well as instantly to reject a fraud.

The tints of Irish-made glass. Glass made at Waterford, late in the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth, was a fine product, often exquisitely cut: it is distinguishable in more than one way, but has a characteristic tinge which, once seen, is unmistakable. I cannot find exact words for it, it is not a blue nor a green nor a blackish tint, but is something of all three, and was due to excessive presence of oxide of lead. Nobody has done any research as to Irish-made glass, and people suppose that Cork-made glass resembled the Waterford glass, but that is very unlikely, because each factory mixed according to its own recipe, and also used a different variety of each of the raw materials common to all glass. In point of fact, Cork glass is “duller” than Waterford, and it has quite a different, a pale, almost dun or yellowish, tinge, particularly visible in the thicker parts; a good many lustre-ornaments seem to have been made at Cork. Belfast glass was yellowish, too, if we may judge by the tint of Williamite glasses.

2. THE SOUND OF OLD GLASS

Perhaps because more lead was used in the “metal” or raw material, but at any rate for some distinctive reason, old English and Irish-made glass has a more musical sound than any made abroad. Flick or flip with your finger-nail, or pinch near your ear, a piece of this old ware, and a vibrant, resonant, and lingering ring is audible. The thinner the part of the glass you flick the more the sound, of course; but something of a ring should come from almost any part of the article. Another way of producing this characteristic sound is to keep on rubbing a wetted finger around the edge of the bowl of a wine glass or finger bowl, till rhythmic vibration is set up, and the sound steals forth. And it is a bell-like, musical note, almost the F sharp or G sharp, or A or B of the 4th octave in a pianoforte keyboard: darkish glass with this resonance is almost sure to be old English or Irish made. Much eighteenth-century Dutch glass is still extant here, and is often mistaken for English; but it need not be: thin or thick, Dutch glass sends out no lingering resonance, long, clear, musical, and true. Dutch glass tinkles when you flip it, but the sound is dead a few seconds after being born. The sound test for old English or Irish glass is, Does it ring with a musical note that throbs, sings, and lingers in a way to delight the ear? The sound of old Dutch, French, Italian, or German glass is cracked, so to speak, though the vessel itself is not; but

are lines which Tennyson might have written to describe the music of old English and Irish glass; too much stress cannot be laid upon this test—the lasting note is the criterion.

So that now, with both tint and sound to guide us, we need not be taken in by modern copies or old Dutch glass.

3. THE QUALITY OF OLD GLASS METAL

Italians and Frenchmen came to England in the sixteenth century to teach the art and mystery of glass-making to our islanders; yet neither old Italian nor French glass metal has the quality of old English and Irish glass metal. The glassware made here between the reigns of Queen Anne and Queen Victoria had the best quality of any glass ever made in the world. But what is quality in this connexion? It means material, but it also means the manipulation of material and the effect produced. The glass made during the reigns of the four Georges was called “flint glass” and “lead glass”—misnomers, perhaps, but I need not take up space here in discussing that; the important point is that the quality of the metal and the skill of the manipulation resulted in thinness, rigidity, shapeliness, a velvety surface, dark sheen, brilliancy, radiancy of facets when cut, and the vibrant, musical ring of the eighteenth-century glass. Glass made under Charles II was not so dark, and Victorian glass was whiter; Victorian and modern English glass is of excellent quality, but is uniform to almost a painful degree. It lacks character and diversity; the Georgian glass was individual and original, so to speak. There were faults in it—little air-blobs, or vesicles, that feel like pimples on the surface, or show as bubbles within it; striations, like lines of fibre, also; and deviations from the strict mathematic line or curve, which were due to hand-work. But if you examine contemporary Dutch-made, French-made, or Italian-made glass, you notice that the same defects exist, and more numerously, while there is a flimsiness, or a lumpiness, or a smeary look and harsh feel which are absent from old English and Irish glass.

A specked, pimply surface, and a dull thickness and clumsy lumpiness or flashy thin lightness, are found in old Dutch-made glass; and this, taken in conjunction with the absence of true ring, enables a collector to reject the old ware sent over from Holland. The quality of the English and Irish glass metal comes out in the surface, too, a little; the fingers feel the surface of an old blown wine glass to be cool, smooth, hard, and yet velvety; while the surface of Waterford cut-glass has a silky feel.

4. THE WEIGHT OF OLD GLASS

In his privately circulated book on “English Baluster Stemmed Glasses of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” Mr. Francis Buckley aptly says that “English-made glasses of the first period were all light in weight and cloudy in appearance. Some time between the Restoration and the end of the seventeenth century, but when precisely it is difficult to say, the English glass-makers began to try experiments with a view to removing from their glasses this dull and cloudy appearance. Their object was to produce a substance like crystal; and this object they eventually achieved by introducing into their metal a large quantity of lead.” This gave the characteristic weight.

The old Dutch glass seems light in weight, even when it is thick; old English and Irish glass seems relatively heavy even when it is thin. Waterford glass is especially heavy. These differences in weight are probably due to differences in the materials used for mixing the metal; but whatever the cause, they aid the collector to know the real from the counterfeit, and the old English from the Dutch. Even the thick, clumsy glasses made here in the reign of William and Mary seem more weighty than those otherwise exactly similar which were then brought over from Holland.

5. THE SIGNS OF USE AND WEAR

Many fantastic pieces of old glass were made as curiosities or ornaments, but most old glass was made for use. Glass is easily scratched; as the wine glasses and decanters were set down upon the hard, polished mahogany of dinner-tables, after the cloth was drawn, and were moved, the feet of the wine glasses and the bases of the decanters become scratched thereby. Lustre-ornaments, glass candlesticks, or glass vases which stood upon marble or hard wood mantelpieces, being moved when maidservants were dusting, became scratched at the base. The collector will therefore carefully examine those parts of a piece of glass which, if it is old, may be expected to show the signs of use and wear caused by contact and movement upon hard surfaces; it is well to do this by the aid of a pocket-lens—which ought to be a glass collector’s constant companion.

In a genuine old piece the scratches are numerous, do not all run the same way, and are dust-coloured, more or less. Most counterfeits show no scratches at all, but the more elaborate forgeries show artificial scratches; these usually run all one way, however, or seem all to have been made together at the same time, and sometimes these artificial scratchings appear in parts of the glass which would not be exposed to marking of the kind when in use, as, for instance, inside the bowls.

Yet it is not wise to condemn and refuse as a fraud a piece of glass which shows the other four or five general evidences of genuineness simply because only slight scratching is evident; for the glass may have been standing in a cupboard unused for many years, its nose put out of joint by some change of fashion in table-ware soon after it had been bought, and have passed into a collector’s cabinet before coming into your hands for examination. Nor is it safe to suppose that the more the scratches the older the piece; it may have had more than the common amount of usage. If the glass has a “folded foot” or a “ring-base” to stand on, the scratches will be at the very edge of the foot, or on the ring, just where it touched the table or mantelpiece, and there only.

6. THE PONTIL-MARK

I mention this last because it does not apply to all old glass; it does not apply to glass that was cast or moulded, but it applies to all old blown glass, and is a very important test and guide indeed.

The pontil-mark is either a depression in the glass, shallow, about the size of the third finger-end, or a lump about that size, standing up from the level of the glass around it. The pontil-mark indicates first that the piece of glass was originally blown, and second that before removing the blow-pipe the workman, as usual, attached the blown glass to a pontil. The pontil or punt is an iron rod, joined to the vessel by a little melted glass while the vessel is still hot. When the time comes for taking away the pontil, it is done by contact with cold water, which causes the glass to contract around the pontil-end and the pontil to become detached. Glass vessels which were blown, only, show the depression or the lump accordingly: blown-glass vessels which were afterwards “cut” show it in part only, or not at all, if the glass-cutter removed it: vessels neither blown nor cut, but cast in a mould, do not show it because they never had it. In the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, glass moulding seldom took place; so that the presence of the pontil-mark, whether it be a hollow or a lump, usually indicates age in the vessel which shows it.

In the oldest glass the pontil-hole is flaked with something which rather resembles mica. In the oldest wine glasses the pontil-lump stands out knobbily. In every case there are signs of the local fracture. As a rule, the older the glass the bigger and rougher the pontil-mark.

7. THE WORKMANSHIP

The sensible, practical adaptation to purpose and the workmanlike make of English and Irish old glass afford another test; compared with our native product, French glass of the same period seems meagre, and Dutch flimsy or clumsy; Italian is fantastic and tawdry. The French and the Italian ware was often gilded, the Dutch painted: these are features seldom seen on English and Irish glass. In place of gilding or other added external decoration the island ware presented a substance neither too thin nor too thick, bowls perfectly rounded, stems strong and stout but not bulky, too tall, or too short; feet that hold on to the table well, and are not warped and uneven. In the freak and toy pieces, too, the excellence of the workmanship is obvious.