Another interesting class of diamond-scratched Dutch glass is well represented in the British Museum. Here we find portraits of contemporary celebrities, of members of the house of Orange in many cases, together with coats-of-arms, scratched on the bowls of wine-glasses—either conical glasses of Venetian forms or tall narrow ‘flutes.’ Sometimes, indeed, designs of this character are found on winged glasses of purely Venetian type. Mr. Nesbitt was of opinion that these were made in Venice (Slade Catalogue, No. 891), but we now know, thanks to M. Schuermans’ researches, that such glasses may well have been produced at this time in the north. The similarity in form of the bulbs or knops on the stems of all the glasses of this series should be noted: in no case is there any trace of cutting with the wheel on this part, still less of any facetting. On a thin funnel-shaped glass (Slade, No. 889) we have on one side the arms of England and Orange-Nassau impaled, on the other is a portrait of a lady in the costume of the middle of the seventeenth century, doubtless the ‘counterfeit’ of Mary, Princess of Orange, the daughter of Charles I. It is to her that we must refer the inscription in Gothic letters, ‘_Het Welvaren Van De Princes_.’ In these Dutch glasses scratched with the diamond may be found perhaps the earliest instances of glasses ‘that have been made to speak.’ [Illustration: _PLATE XLIII_ BEAKER WITH THE FOUR SEASONS IN MEDALLIONS DESIGN SCRATCHED WITH DIAMOND. DATED 1663. PROBABLY NETHERLANDISH] Of quite another nature were the elaborate compositions engraved for the most part with the wheel upon plates of glass. It was to work of this kind that Gerard Dou was brought up by his father—himself ‘a glass-worker and writer on glass,’ and subsequently master of the glass-makers’ guild at Leyden. The younger Dou was apprenticed to one Dolendo, who is described as ‘a right good plate-etcher,’ before he entered the studio of Rembrandt (Martin, _Gerard Dou_, pp. 28-29). There came into fashion in Holland in the next century a method of engraving on glass, if engraving it can be called, of quite a different nature. This is the stipple or dotted method, the _stip_ of the Dutch, by which a design of the utmost delicacy—a mere breath, as it were—is made to appear on the surface of the glass. When examined with a glass the decoration is seen to be built up of minute dots as in a stipple engraving,[226] differing from the latter, however, in this, that in the case of the work on the glass, the lights are given by the dots and the clear untouched ground represents the shadow.