The first we hear of Mansell in this connection is in the year 1615, when we find him associated with Sir Edward Zouche, Thelwell, Percivall, and others in a patent for making glass with sea-coal. But before this he had probably for some time been interested in certain London glass-works. And now before two years had elapsed he had bought out all his partners[241] and commenced his reign as ‘glass-king.’ This monopoly, in spite of frequently renewed opposition, Mansell succeeded in maintaining up to the time of his death in the days of the Protectorate. He hunted down the local glass-houses where wood, now forbidden by law, was still employed. He granted licences to some of the Lorrainers working at Stourbridge and elsewhere, while—as at Newcastle, where he had glass-works under his direct management—he took others of these foreigners into his employ. In London, on the other hand, at the glass-furnaces of Winchester House, which he now took over, Sir Robert employed Italians. We here come into contact with another and not less interesting man, James Howell, like his master Mansell, a Welshman.[242] Howell was in 1618 ‘steward of the glasse-house’ in Southwark, but he was glad to change this position for that of traveller for Mansell in Spain and Italy; for, so he writes to his father, ‘I should in a short time have melted away to nothing among these hot Venetians.’ His duties were now to obtain workmen from Italy, and the raw materials, especially the ‘barillia,’ from Spain. In the following year he brought over one of the famous Miotti family from Middelburg, and not long afterwards we find him writing from Alicante an interesting account of the ‘Barillia, a strange kind of vegetable that grows nowhere upon the surface of the Earth, in that perfection as here.’ ‘The Venetians have it hence,’ he continues, and he proceeds to give a detailed account of the method of preparation (Book I. section I. xxv.). Howell’s letters from Venice are most interesting, and have provided many ‘elegant extracts’ for later writers. For instance, there is a passage in which he speaks of ‘lasses and glasses,’ and of the brittleness that beauty shares with the mirrors of Venice[243]—the rest of the passage is, however, rather too outspoken for our present taste.