It was apparently not long before this time that the Germans began to apply enamels to their drinking-vessels whether of glass or pottery. Mathesius (1562) speaks of enamelling as a new art. ‘The ready wit of man,’ he says, ‘is always finding something new; some have on the white glass painted all kinds of pictures and mottoes, and burnt them in, in the annealing oven,[197] as we find the “counterfeits” of great men and their arms _painted upon the panes that are set in our windows_.’ This is an important passage which confirms what we might otherwise be led to infer—namely, that the origin of the enamelling that we find on the beakers of the German renaissance must be sought, not in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century enamelled glass of Venice, but rather in the new method of colouring window-glass that was at this time spreading all over Germany. I refer to the highly finished pictures, _painted in enamel colours_ on white glass and subsequently burned in, which were now replacing, especially for secular use, the true lead-mounted stained glass of the old church windows. It was an easy step to apply this method of decoration to the cylindrical surfaces of the great tankards and goblets from which the German people drank their beer. Now it is not in Northern or Central Germany that we find the best specimens of these enamelled ‘quarries.’ The finest examples come from the south, from Nuremberg, from Swabia, and above all from Switzerland, at that time the home of a distinguished school of glass painters. And the same may be said of the glasses, though this is a point that has been somewhat neglected until quite lately. Both the _willkomm-humpen_ and the _pass-gläser_—the broad and narrow cylinders—found in Swiss and Bavarian collections are, as a rule, much more carefully decorated than the quaint but rude glasses of what we must vaguely call the central district. Unfortunately we have no means of more definitely determining the place of origin of the latter class of beakers; in fact it may be said generally of the glass made on both sides of the mountains that encircle Bohemia, that there is little to distinguish the productions of the different centres, however far apart they may lie. [Illustration: _PLATE XXXIX_ GERMAN GLASS. WILLKOMM HUMPEN. ENAMELLED WITH THE EAGLE OF EMPIRE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY]