[237] 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.
[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.
[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.
[240] The most important of these documents are given in full in the Appendix to Mr. Hartshorne’s English Glasses.
[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.
[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.’
[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.
[244] These are little cylindrical vessels for burning tallow. The name survives as an equivalent to a night-light.
[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.
[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.