[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.
[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.
[249] The confusion is increased by the fact that on the Continent the term ‘cristal’ was now transferred to the lead-glass.
[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.
[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.
[252] The new financial methods are well illustrated in the quotation from Houghton on p. 318.
[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).
[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.
[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).
[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.