According to his story, certain Phœnician merchants landed on the coast of Palestine and cooked their food in pots supported on cakes of nitre taken from their cargo.
Great was the wonder of these Phœnicians—the Yankees of antiquity, the builders of Tyre and Sidon, the inventors of the alphabet—on beholding solid matter changed to a strange fluid, which voluntarily mingled with its nearest neighbor, the sand, and made a transparent material now called glass.
This story is too pretty to spoil, and those of us who prefer romance to science will believe it, though Menet the chemist positively declares that to produce such a fluid would require a heat from 1800 to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. Under the circumstances narrated by Pliny, such a tremendously high temperature was impossible. Science often interferes with romance, and were not truth better even than poetry, science would be a nuisance in literature.
An art that Hermes taught to Egyptian chemists like good wine needs no bush, yet on its brilliant crest may be found the splendid quarterings not only of Egypt, but of Gaul, Rome, Byzantium, Venice, Germany, Bohemia, Great Britain, and last but not least the United States.
He was a poor man, who, in Seneca's day, had not his house decorated with various designs in glass; while Scaurus, the Aedile, a superintendent of public buildings in ancient Rome, actually built a theatre seating forty thousand persons, the second story of which was made of glass. That masterpiece of ancient manufacture, the Portland Vase, was taken from the tomb of the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus, and should bear his name rather than that of the Duchess of Portland, who purchased it from the Barberini family after it had stood three hundred years in their famous Roman gallery.
In the thirteenth century Venice reigned supreme in glass making. No one knows how long the City of Doges might have monopolized certain features of this art but for a woman who could not keep a secret from her lover. Marietta was the daughter of Beroviero, one of the most famous glass makers of the fifteenth century. Many were his receipts for producing colored glass, and as he had faith in his own flesh and blood he confided these precious receipts to his daughter. Alas, for poor Beroviero! Marietta, after the manner of women, loved a man, one Giorgio, an artisan in her father's employ. History does not tell, but I have no doubt that Giorgio wheedled the secret out of his sweetheart.