Much old English and Irish glass was contemporaneously sent to the American market, and the following articles were advertised as on sale at New York in the year 1773: “Very Rich Cut Glass Candlesticks, Cut Glass Sugar Boxes and Cream Potts, Wine, Wine-and-Water Glasses, and Beer Glasses, with Cut Shanks, Jelly and Syllabub Glasses, Glass Salvers, also Cyder Glasses, Orange and Top Glasses, Glass Cans, Glass Cream Buckets and Crewets, Royal Arch Mason Glasses, Globe and Barrel Lamps, etc.” The “etc.” would be capacious; it would include most of the articles mentioned in the paragraph just preceding this, and such things as crystal globes to be filled with water through which a candle might throw and condense its rays, for sewing or lace-making purposes, at night.
(1) BRISTOL; AND (2) NAILSEA COLOURED GLASS WITCH-BALLS
A collector ignores window-glass, unless he can come upon stained glass, purchasing, for £5 perhaps, a leaded square or oval of sixteenth-century Swiss or German painted glass, to hang in one of his windows. A collector ignores plate-glass, except in the form of mirrors, perhaps. A collector ignores carboys, and also ordinary bottles, but he acquires when he can one of the thick, stumpy, almost black glass bottles in which Georgian people bottled their own claret or port, imported in the cask. It adds interest to an antique bookcase, corner cupboard, or cabinet if the panes, or some of them, show the slight curvature characteristic before perfectly flat sheet-glass could be cast; and there are some old panes in which the oxides have turned to a violet colour—a silversmith’s shop nearly opposite the top end of the Haymarket still displays some—which are of interest to-day. There used to be glass objects which, I suppose, we shall never come upon now: the “mortar” or nightlight-glass, of the kind which stood beside the last sleep of Charles I, and the “singing-glasses” which Pepys heard in 1668, when he “had one or two singing-glasses made, which make an echo to the voice, the first I ever saw; but so thin, that the very breath broke one or two of them.” These, and many other beautiful pieces of old glass, are for ever gone out of reach.
But the hunter may come upon pieces which came into existence before Queen Anne died: Jacobean glass, of the reign of Charles II at latest, is occasionally found. For a guinea I obtained a fine sacramental vessel in purfled and wreathed glass bearing the symbol of the Trinity (see [next page]); for 5s. a pistol-shaped scent bottle; and for 12s. 6d. a hand lamp, all three of Jacobean date.
THE HUNT FOR IT
In fact, the limits in glass-collecting are not yet fixable; you never know what quaint or rare thing you may not come upon in old glass. Other lines of collecting are already systematized, and part of the systematization is a limiting of what you may expect to find and a raising of what you may have to pay. With glass there are no such boundaries, at present; anything out of the ordinary in shape, purpose, or date, may be acquired, and should be—the uncommon pieces are the best—though often because a piece is quite unusual, it will be offered you at a very low price. The smaller dealers know that from half a guinea to a couple of guineas is what they may charge for an old wine glass, according to the knobs or the spiral in its stem, but they do not know any fixed price for less common specimens, and they will sell at a hundred per cent. profit on the very small charges they themselves have paid.