The Dutch seem above all to have esteemed the _ruimer_ or _roemer_; on glasses of this shape the finest engraving and diamond-scratching were expended, and it was these glasses that they selected to mount on tall silver stands of elaborate workmanship. There are the _bekerschroeven_ (beaker-screws), which may at times be seen on the buffet in a seventeenth-century Dutch interior. There are several fine examples of these trophy-like arrangements in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. For us, seeing that we must confine ourselves to points of real artistic interest or historical significance, the glass made by the Dutch in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is of importance mainly under these two aspects: 1. That here the art of engraving, or rather scratching, with the diamond was carried to greater perfection than in any other country. 2. That starting from the close of the seventeenth century, the forms and methods of construction of the Dutch drinking-glasses (apart from the _roemer_) first greatly influenced, and then in turn were influenced by, our English glasses. As in Germany, where the Emperor Ferdinand III. learned the art, drawing with the diamond on glass was in Holland practised as an elegant accomplishment by people in good position, and above all by ladies. Indeed we are here brought into contact with a cultured literary set, a _coterie_ of which the members held a higher social, and perhaps intellectual, position than we can allow to the majority of the great painters of the day whose names are better known to us. Typical frequenters of this circle were the three sisters, daughters of Roemer Vischer, who were immortalised in the songs of Huyghens, Cats, and Hooft (Don Henriques de Castro, ‘_Een en ander over Glasgravure_,’ _Oud Holland_, i. 286; see also Hartshorne, p. 48). A still more famous literary lady was Anna Maria van Schurman, who among so many other accomplishments had, as Cats has recorded, mastered the art ‘_met een diamant op het glas gheestigh to schrijven_.’[224] Several good examples of the work of these ladies, which took the form for the most part of mottoes engraved with scrolls and flourishes on the bowls of _roemers_, are preserved in the Rijks Museum: some of these have been admirably reproduced by Mr. Hartshorne in his work on English glasses.[225]