modern alloys bronze appears to have been used in this country even as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century, the cooking vessels illustrated in Figs. 30 and 31 being bronze of this late type. [Illustration: FIG. 29.--SKILLET (BRASS), THE HANDLE OF WHICH IS ENGRAVED WITH THE MOTTO "PITTY THE PORE."] [Illustration: FIGS. 30 AND 31.--BRONZE COOKING VESSELS, ATTRIBUTED TO THE BEGINNING OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. (_In the British Museum._)] The skillet, which continued a favourite vessel, commonly called a saucepan, originally had three short-curved feet, and the handle was curved, too. It was a development of a still earlier cooking vessel; its prototype of the sixteenth century having a globular body with short-curved feet, and frequently two handles. The twentieth-century collector, accustomed as he is to machine-and factory-made goods of uniform finish and of regular shapes, is apt to be a little bit disappointed with the copper curios roughly made and badly formed. It would appear as if most of the collectable copper goods were made after the days when the old guilds so carefully controlled the making of copper and latten in Lothbury. When their power of control waned, craftsmen who had been employed by guild members worked for themselves, and there was but little supervision over the metal wares made by the coppersmith, who was often a retailer of his own wares. When the hardware dealer or copper man became an established trader in the eighteenth century he would employ a journeyman coppersmith in his little workshop, who would fashion the utensils with a hammer on a wooden block, and afterwards planish them by hand as he thought fit. In the making of such goods there was great irregularity, and the dealer and his customer, too, were dependent upon the whim of the craftsman. That was before the days of machine-made goods. Instead of the brass or copper being pressed and stamped by machinery and carefully finished the utensils were made in a rough and ready way on the wooden block, and simply hammered in the rounded cavities which had been made in it. Saucepans, stewpans, and jelly moulds were beaten into shape, and then hollowed and dished. It is said it was a healthful trade, for many of the old coppersmiths had passed their threescore years and ten shaping kettles and deftly fashioning from a sheet of brass even quite ornamental domestic articles of utility; they would decorate by hand a brass chestnut roaster with no other tools but a small hammer and a punch, and with the same simple instruments they would work a fancy pattern on the lid of a warming-pan. Some coppersmiths won fame in the fashioning of furnace-pans, better known as washing coppers, and others would undertake the roofing of houses and churches. One notable firm in London, whose copper saucepans and cooking-pots had been sold for a hundred years or more, achieved the zenith of their fame when they