[257] The famous Royal Oak glass, with the portrait of Charles II., now belonging to Mr. Festing (Hartshorne, Plate 29), is certainly a case in point, whatever may be the origin of the glass itself. But this goblet is scratched with a diamond.
[258] The latter inscription refers of course to the famous forty-fifth number of Wilkes’s North Briton (April 1763). The ‘No Excise’ may be associated with the successful agitation against Walpole’s bill in 1733-34, or perhaps rather with later protests of the same nature.
[259] For these glasses see especially the twenty-fourth chapter of Mr. Hartshorne’s often-quoted work, not neglecting the most interesting notes.
[260] It must be remembered that ‘James III.’ did not die until 1766; his ‘reign’ of sixty-five years exceeded that of any other English prince. Although most of these Jacobite glasses date from a period rather after than before ‘the ’45’ there was still a long interval during which the attribution I have suggested would be justified.
[261] This house has remained in the hands of the same family since the time it was built by Walter Jones, in the reign of James I.
[262] This period of English glass is not represented in the British Museum. It is well illustrated in the collection of Mr. C. E. Jerningham, and there are some fine examples among the more miscellaneous glass of Mr. FitzHenry now (1906) on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
[263] I have purposely gone to older works for these technical details, that is to say, to works written before the general introduction of modern mechanical processes; for example, to Apsley Pellat’s Curiosities of Glass-making, and to the treatise on glass by Porter in Lardner’s series (1832). For the materials used in England in the eighteenth century see Dossie’s Handmaid of the Arts, 2nd edition, 1764.
[264] This is the more strange, as in all the recipes of the time for making the white enamel, even in one relating apparently to this very Bristol glass, arsenic plays an important part.
[265] Dossie, in his Handmaid of the Arts, 2nd ed., 1764, tells us that at that time much white opaque glass, in imitation of porcelain, was made near London. The glass, he states, was rendered opaque by tin, by antimony, or by arsenic. Much of this material was doubtless employed for enamelling on metal.
[266] Chardin was a French dealer in precious stones who supplied the Shah with European jewels. The materials for the account of Persia from which the extract given in the text is taken, were collected during a voyage in that country in the years 1671 and 1672. Chardin, who was of an old Protestant family, settled later on in England and was knighted by Charles II. I quote from the English translation of 1724, checking it by the contemporary French edition.