of the ancients and that of the moderns. The artist but faintly illustrates the former by his picture, since neither the delicacy of the structure nor the beauty of the colors can be adequately portrayed on paper. This vase is composed of two layers of glass, the lower one of a deep blue color, the other of an opaque white. The figures etched in white upon a black ground in the engraving are, in the original, made of pure white, standing out upon a back-ground of beautiful blue. So perfect is the blending of the material, so perfect the resemblance to an onyx, that for a long time archæologists described it as being an ancient cameo. It is doubtful whether modern art has ever produced a finer specimen of this kind of work, which is as difficult in execution as it appears simple in description. The workman, to reproduce the Portland vase, for example, has only to dip his blowpipe in a pot of blue glass, and, forming it in a globular shape, to dip it, thus formed, into a second pot of white glass, which, of course, adheres to and incases the globe or bubble of blue. He then blows this double bubble, if we may so describe it, in any shape which he wishes, and he has his vase of white without and blue within. Thereafter what is simpler than to cut away the white coating, leaving the blue back-ground, and the figures as he wishes them in bass-relief of white? This is all. But this requires a delicacy and accuracy which only years of practice give. For glass-work is almost the only kind of manufacture which does not avail itself of machinery, or even, to any considerable extent, of moulds. Every thing depends upon the skill of the individual workman. It is perhaps for this reason that the art has made comparatively little prog ress. For the age which we praise so much is less notable for any development of skilled labor than for its employment of labor-saving machinery. If the ancient Romans excelled in rare and curious work, such as the Portland vase and the unique and striking specimen of a little later date, a picture of which stands at the head of our article, we can not say as much for their common work. While the Duchess of Portland might be very ready to give $10,000 for a single rare vase, she would hardly consent to purchase even for her kitchen the common wares which very noble Romans did not disdain to use upon their tables. For not only were the forms rude and even grotesque, but the ware itself was wretchedly imperfect. It is, indeed, singular that while the ancients wrought their glass into every kind of form, and learned how to ANCIENT ROMAN GLASS-WARE. color it in various hues, the one thing which they found it almost impossible to do was to make a clear white, or rather colorless glass, without impurity or flaw. It was perhaps for this reason, quite as much as for want of understanding how to attach the metal back, that they rarely if ever employed glass in the manufacture of mirrors. Curiously enough, this most fragile of substances, surviving the civilization which both made and employed it, survives to tell us some of the secrets of the ancient toilet-table. If from the past we have inherited many virtues and much knowledge, we have also received from it our vanities and our vices. Fashion, ever changing, is yet ever the same, and was as imperious in Rome in the first century as it is in America in the nineteenth. Among the ancients, so these tell-tale witnesses inform us, there existed, as too commonly with us, an art (a word unfortunately ambiguous) which deceives only the person who uses it-that of painting the skin. Among our illustrations of ancient glass-ware the attentive reader will observe a little glass ball, which contained the paint, and a twisted glass wand, which served the purpose of a brush. We are, unfortunately, so ignorant concerning the modern art as not to know how these instruments compare with those which the artists of the toilet use to-day. The Romans, who borrowed the art of glass THE STRASBOURG VASE. already established and grown to fame, in the fifteenth century. At that time the manufactures of Venice had attained a world-wide celebrity. All Europe imported its glass from Venice. She enjoyed substantially a monopoly of the manufacture-a monopoly which she was loth to resign. To prevent the possible exportation of the art itself to other countries the glass-makers of Venice were placed upon the little island of Murano. They were put under the strictest police inspection. The law forbade, under the severest penalties, any workman from carrying his art to a foreign country. If, escaping the espionage of the police, he succeeded in disobeying this law, his nearest relatives were to be seized and cast into prison as hostages for his return. If, in spite of their imprisonment, he persisted in remaining abroad, an emissary would be employed to assassinate him. That this law was no dead letter is evidenced by the fact that two workmen, attracted by the Emperor Leopold to Germany, were actually put to death by the hired assassins of the republic. Such was "protection" in the fifteenth century. This policy pursued by the government was very naturally imitated in a small way by individuals. Each manufacturer had his own peculiar secret process, which he guarded with making from the Egyptians, carried it in turn the utmost jealousy from all others. But, as to the West. While the Gauls conquered Rome we shall presently see, the jealous guardianby their arms, Rome conquered Gaul, though ship of the government was unavailing to resist much more gradually, by her civilization. Only the demands of commerce and the public welless famous than the Portland vase is the Stras- fare of other peoples. If we may trust the bourg vase, found in 1825 in a coffin, and dis- legends of Venice, the jealousy of individuals interred by chance by a gardener. The net-proved but little more efficacious. Among the work is of red glass and the inscription of green. most notable manufacturers-so the story runs Even the unlearned reader will detect at once-was one Beroviero, who alone possessed a that this is no modern piece of work. The antiquarians, despite the piece broken out of it by the carelessness of its discoverer, decipher upon it the name of MAXIMIANVS AVGVSTVS, which they interpret as Maximianus Herculius, a Roman emperor of the third century, who frequently made Gaul his home. peculiar recipe for coloring glass, the employment of which gave to his workmanship a great reputation, and himself an immense income. He had one only daughter, Marietta, and also a workman, Georgio, who, despite his poverty and a deformity in his feet, which gave to his I whole person an extremely ungainly appearance, had the assurance not only to fall in love with Marietta, but to win her heart. As it may be imagined, the match was not one which the old millionaire would be at all likely to entertain; and marriages without the father's consent were no easy matter in the republic of Venice, which was unfortunately not provided with any Gretna Green. Love, however, is rarely as scrupulous as it is sagacious. Marietta, quite convinced that her father had money enough and her lover quite too little, succeeded Arts have their death and their resurrection. Glass-making, which perished from the earth about the fifth century, was raised again from the dead about the fifteenth. The place of its palingenesis was Venice. To the industry of the valley of the Nile the world is probably indebted for the invention of glass manufacture. To the industry of the city of the sea we owe its re-establishment, and many of those models whose grace and beauty over three centuries of study has done nothing to improve. It is not, indeed, probable that glass-making was literal-in filching from her father's desk the book in ly unknown for ten centuries. Only we are unable, in the gap which history leaves unfilled, to trace its progress during that time. Seeming to be dead, in reality it only hibernated. Venetian legends, indeed, trace the history of its glass-works back to the days of the founding of the city by refugees in 420. Without investigating those legends we will content ourselves with looking in upon the works as they existed, which all his recipes were written, and Georgio was not slow in making a full copy of them. Armed with this copy, the audacious workman appeared before the unsuspecting father, and demanded the hand of his daughter as the price of secrecy. There was no alternative. Beroviero swallowed his wrath, consented, and gave with his daughter such a dowry that the workman was able to set up in business for himself, which he forthwith did, doubtless using the recipes to good advantage. Out of this "study for a story," as Jean Ingelow would call it, our readers can easily construct a romance for themselves, perhaps as entertaining and certainly more true than the average of those which, like it, serve as illustrations of the proverb, "The course of true love never runs smooth." If the lovers of the past must confess that Roman civilization never in its palmiest days equaled the art of Venice, the glorifiers of the present must also concede that modern art has nothing to equal, nothing certainly to surpass it, in elaborate ornamentation and in real artistic beauty. We may, for example, call on the glassworks of the present century in vain to produce any thing finer than this piece of Venetian glass, the date of which we are not, indeed, able to give with certainty, but which is probably not later than the seventeenth century, when the art of glass manufacturing attained its highest perfection in Venice. Of quite a different style of beauty, but nowise inferior, is this wineglass, which belongs to the same city and is attributed to the VENETIAN WINE-GLASS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. VENETIAN BOTTLE same date. The beauty of the Venetian manufactures is more apparent when we compare them with the French work of the same date, which appears rude indeed in comparison. The specimen of the latter from which the artist copies is to be found in the collection bequeathed by the late Mr. Felix Slade to the British Museum, and is remarkable both for its shape and for the enameled painting with which it is decorated. The figure is that of a nobleman in the costume of the period of Henry II., who is presenting to a lady, whose dim outline is just discernible, a bouquet, which, we think, our readers will agree with us indicates that floriculture has improved more than glass manufacturing since the time when this glass was patterned. Let us, however, be impartial. If the ancients excelled in ornamentation, the moderns excel in combining utility with beauty. We can not, perhaps, better note the progress, or at least the change, which has been wrought in glassblowing than by placing side by side before our readers these specimens of the wine-glass of Venice in the fifteenth century and that of the glass-works of Clichy in the nineteenth. The one is more elaborate; the other is purer, clearer, and really denotes higher perfection of workmanship. The one is fitted only for the cabinet or the mantel; the other may enjoy a long and useful life upon the table. The monopoly of Venice was not, as we have already intimated, of long duration. In 1664 Colbert, then Comptroller-General of France, resolved to free his country from the ruinous tribute which, by means of her glass-works, the republic of Venice succeeded in extorting from the subjects of his Majesty Louis XIV. For this purpose he wrote to François de Bonzi, Bishop of Béziers, at that time French embassador to the republic of Venice, to obtain for him the secret of mirror-making, which the Venetians alone possessed, and with it to send him some trained workmen taught in the shops of Murano. This order was much easier to give than VENETIAN AND CLICHY GLASSES. to execute. The reply of the embassador was that, to send workmen to France, he ran the risk of being thrown into the sea. Colbert, nothing daunted, coolly replied that France expected her minister not to lose sight of the instructions which had been given him. The bishop had possibly exaggerated the danger that he might enhance the estimate placed upon his services. At all events, the enmity of the Venetians was less to be dreaded than the displeasure of the minister, and the result was that within a year eighteen Venetian workmen, despite the rigorous laws and careful espionage of their own land, arrived in France. Thus in the latter part of the seventeenth century was introduced into that country the manufacture of mirrors, for which she has been since so justly celebrated. At almost the same time private enterprise accomplished the same result which had proved so difficult to the minister and the bishop. Several young men of Strasbourg, so the legend runs, left their native town, hoping to secure the privilege of an apprenticeship in the factories of Murano. They found, however, the doors closed against them. Το the Venetian every foreigner was an enemy. Repulsed at the doors, they took lessons of their unconscious teachers in another way. Being young men of pertinacity and courage, as well as of enterprise, they climbed to the roof, and, while the Venetians were carrying on their works in fancied security, doors and windows being closed, they succeeded in learning the method which had for a long time been kept concealed from the world outside. Armed with this secret they returned to France to cooperate with Colbert in giving to their native country the new art. So successful were they that in 1669 the importation of mirrors from Venice was prohibited, for which, in 1664, the country had paid the sum of a hundred thousand crowns a year. At about the same time that glass manufacture was thus introduced into France it was also commenced in Germany and Bohemia. It is curious to trace, even in the slightest fabrics, the mental and moral characteristics of different nations. The genius of Italy displays itself in glass-ware, rare, costly, beautiful, but remarkable rather for its singular forms, for its curving lines, variegated colors, and elaborate ornamentation, than for its utility. GERMAN WIEDERKOMMEN. In Germany, where beer supplants wine, and sociality, if not conviviality, is characteristic, rather than the exquisite taste which belongs to Italy's sunny skies, the glass-works were made to serve the purposes of the national gardens and the national festivals. It is still a custom, we believe, at the German universities-it was at least until recently-for the students to close their festive parties by pledging each other in a glass of beer or wine, which was passed around the circle from man to man and drunk out of in turn by each. This custom, borrowed from the ancient Germans, who were even heartier drinkers than their descendants, and, perhaps, by them in turn from the Greeks, necessitated a pretty large cup, since at the close of such a feast no one took a very small sip. This cup, called the wiederkommen, because it made the circuit and came back again, was a favorite subject of ornamentation among the German artists in glass. Such a glass as the Venetians delighted in would hardly hold enough for a single German guest, and would never travel its round in safety. The Venetian, on the other hand, would doubtless look with scorn on |