Before the end of the sixteenth century, the glass-houses of Antwerp where glass _à la façon de Venise_ was made had acquired a European reputation. They stood quite apart from the other furnaces in France or in the Netherlands where Italians were employed. Lodovico Guicciardini, the historian of the Netherlands, speaks as early as 1567 of the ‘_vassella di vetro alla Veneziana_’ made in Antwerp, and in the later editions of his work (_Descrizione di Tutti Paesi Bassi_) some further details are given. The testimony of another Florentine, Neri, from whose little book on glass I have already quoted, is still stronger. It was at Antwerp, he tells us, not at Venice, that he had studied the processes of glass-making. If Antwerp thus early held a commanding position in Spanish Flanders, in the Walloon country the glass-houses of Liége in the course of the seventeenth century grew to a position of even greater importance. This was due above all to the enterprise of the great firm of the De Bonhommes, who before the end of the century had almost a monopoly of the glass trade in those parts: they even established subsidiary works beyond the frontier in such places as Verdun. They were one of the first on the Continent to see the importance of the new English flint-glass; at all events it is recorded that as early as 1680 they made flint-glass _à l’Anglaise_,[177] and were thus able to withstand the Bohemian[178] competition which at that time was carrying everything before it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Bohemian engraved glass was copied in both the Walloon and Flemish parts of what is now Belgium. Indeed when the latter district fell under Austrian rule early in the eighteenth century, there was naturally a tendency to encourage Bohemian methods of decoration. Specimens of this engraved glass may be seen in the museums of many Belgian towns, but I have seen nothing to equal, in spirit and high finish, the contemporary engraved glass of the United Provinces. As for the earlier _cristallo_ made at Antwerp, say from 1550 to 1650, the difficulty is to distinguish, in the case of the specimens that have survived, the local work from that imported from Venice, and we have evidence that even at the time the native experts could not always do so.[179]