We shall now be in a better position to attack that extensive and complicated series, the drinking-glasses of the eighteenth century. Mr. Hartshorne, who in his _Old English Glasses_[253] has treated the subject in great detail, mentions incidentally that he has made more than a thousand full-sized outlines of glasses that have passed through his hands. We must be content, then, to accept the classification of such an authority, although some of the divisions may seem a little arbitrary to one who has no claim to be an expert. Thus out of sixteen families of English eighteenth-century glass there are only two that contain any objects other than drinking-glasses in the narrower sense of the word; again, four or five of the groups are based chiefly upon the liquor—wine, beer, mead, mumm, syllabub, cider, cordial water, or punch—that these glasses were presumably made to contain. In a division of glasses from this latter point of view I shall only mention three heads which alone seem to me of sufficient importance to merit separate treatment—wine-glasses, glasses for ale and beer, and glasses for cordial waters—and even these, though varying in size, pass through the same series of shapes in bowl and stem. Again, a cross division may be made distinguishing the ruder and somewhat more solid household and tavern glasses from those destined for the table of the wealthy. The main lines, however, of the classification of these drinking-glasses must be based upon the form of the bowl and upon the outline and construction of the stem. But first a word may be said of the relation of our eighteenth-century glasses to their predecessors and contemporaries on the Continent. On the whole, one may conclude that the new forms and methods of decoration grew up in Holland, in the Spanish Netherlands, or again in the Liége district, towards the end of the seventeenth century, when the old Italian influence was giving way to processes and schemes of decoration that had their origin in Germany and Bohemia. The methods of the great firms of the Bonhommes and the De Colnets were above all eclectic; the opaque-twisted stems of their glasses were essentially of Venetian origin, the engraved bowl had its prototype in Germany, and the material finally—the ‘metal’—before long was English.