Soon after this time there are many complaints of the decadence and vulgarisation of the art. Thus in 1708 a writer in a commercial paper complains that the engraved glass, which formerly was only to be found on the table of people of quality, had now become ‘dirt-cheap,’ and that the art of the glass-cutter was brought into contempt by the hawkers of glasses who scoured nearly the whole of Europe with their engraved wares. Whole chestsful of these commoner glasses, the writer says, were sent to Spain, and found there a good market (quoted by Von Czihak, p. 129). Sandrart, it will be remembered, some years before this, had uttered a protest against the _stimpler_—the bungling, ignorant workmen—who were ruining the art, and now we find the same expression used in the diploma of the monopoly that was granted to the above-mentioned Winter in 1687 by Count Christoph Leopold of Silesia. Thanks in a measure to the energy of Winter and to the support given to him, the little town of Warmbrunn soon became known all through Germany as well for its cut glass as for the warm springs to which it owed its name. As in other parts of Silesia, the glass industry, after the separation from Bohemia, suffered from the fiscal regulations of the new Prussian régime. Frederick the Great took an interest in the manufacture of glass, but this was shown rather in the encouragement and patronage accorded to the new glass-works that had been established nearer to his capital. On the other side of the mountains also, at the end of the seventeenth century, some of the great Bohemian landholders were active in promoting the manufacture of glass on their estates. Of the Kinsky family and the town of Steinschönau (even to-day a great centre of the glass industry), we hear something in the curious account of his life left by a wandering glass-cutter, one Kreybich, who was born in that town in 1662. Kreybich, who had mastered the arts both of enamelling and engraving glass, carried his wares on his barrow all over Southern Germany. In his later journeys he pushed forward as far as Poland and Russia. As early as 1688 he is found in London, where, in spite of the competition of many new glass-furnaces (these, he confesses, turned out better metal than that which he had with him), he found a good demand for his engraved glass. When the wandering retailers of glass—we can hardly call them hawkers—returned to renew their supplies, then, says Kreybich, there was an eager demand from the glass-houses, and no less from the glass-cutters, the _kugler_, and the polishers. But not a few of these wandering glassmen carried, it would seem, their engraving-wheel and their tools with them, and engraved on the spot the arms or the initials of the purchasers of their glasses.