under Du Noyer at Paris, in his manufactory of mirrors, these workmen were forbidden to teach their trade to any Frenchman. The result, as I have said, was that Du Noyer finally brought about a combination with M. de Nehou, the owner of certain glassworks at Tour-la-ville in Normandy, that De Nehou came to Paris, that out of their joint enterprise eventually arose the company now known as the Company of St.-Gobain, that the French workmen trained by De Nehou did excellent work, and that De Nehou put himself in the way of making, towards the end of the seventeenth century, his invention of plate glass, which finally drove Venetian mirrors out of the markets of the world. The Venetian mirrors, charming as they are from the aesthetic point of view of decorative art, are simply blown glass rolled flat, cut, polished, and tinned. The art of making them came, like other arts, to Venice from the East, and in the sixteenth century the Venetian mirror was the true 'glass of fashion' all over Europe. The famous 'Galerie des Glaces' at Versailles, of which Louis XIV. was so proud, was filled up with mirrors of 'French manufacture after the fashion of Venice,' as the royal expense-rolls state, and it took De Nehou and his workmen five years--from 1678 to 1683--to do the work. Eight years afterwards, in 1691, he presented King Louis with certain 'large mirrors of plate glass,' the firstfruits of his invention, made in 1689. In 1693, he was made Director of the 'Royal Manufactory of Grand Mirrors,' and the manufactory was established in the ruined Chateau de St.-Gobain. A hundred years afterwards, in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Venice with a French army and made an end of that 'most serene' republic, as he did, not long afterwards, of the least serene republic at Paris. He put Berthier in command, and a commission of French savants, of which Berthollet was a member, proceeded to pick the locks and investigate the mysteries of Venetian art. Their report upon the Venetian glassworks was to the effect that France knew more about the matter than Venice. 'The industries of Venice,' said these irreverent conquerors, 'as precocious as the industries of China, have stood still like them.'