The gold, then, was applied first—at an early stage in the development of this family of glass it was perhaps the only decoration; the outline was then accentuated by means of red lines, and the coloured enamels then laid on in thick masses. We cannot say whether the colours were all melted on at one firing, for we know nothing in this case of the practical arrangements of the muffle-stove. On the exquisitely enamelled bottle from Würzburg in the British Museum (Plate XXII.), perhaps technically the most superb specimen of this class of decoration that has come down to us, the pinkish tint of the red and the manner in which it is gradated into the white, call to mind the use of the _rouge d’or_ on Chinese porcelain of the eighteenth century; the green also of the conventional foliage is here shaded into the opaque white. The blue ground of the central medallion is of a brilliant turquoise, quite unapproached in other examples; the surface, however, of this blue enamel is in this case glassy and quite unlike the dead surface that we see on the mosque lamps. Are we to regard this opaque turquoise enamel as also based upon _lapis lazuli_, or rather as a soda-copper silicate? As to the motives of the enamelled decoration—if figure subjects are absent from the mosque lamps, they are of frequent occurrence on the bottles and goblets: there we have polo-players and falconers mounted on horses, yellow, pink, and white; seated figures drinking and feasting or playing on musical instruments—always the same jovial, round-faced type; in only one instance have I noticed an elderly man with a beard. We sometimes find a frieze with dogs chasing stags and hares, or it may be a row of conventional lions. Birds are still more frequent—flying geese, as in the background of the hunting scenes, or long-necked herons forming part of the ornamental design of the field. Certain quaint little fishes with big heads and long fins, always of the same form, are not uncommon on the vases and cups; they are sometimes arranged herring-bone fashion; in one case, indeed, these little fishes are found on a mosque lamp.