Although the history of English glass during the eighteenth century—it would be more accurate perhaps to say from about 1670 to 1770—tends always to fall back upon the drinking-glass, yet during that time the material was applied also to the manufacture of many other objects. We find in the earlier records frequent reference to large vessels of glass, blown or cast; this was indeed the case as far back as the time when Chiddingfold was the centre of glass-making. A favourite form at the end of the seventeenth century—but here again a drinking-glass—was the ‘yard,’ an exaggerated outgrowth of the Venetian or Low Country ‘flute.’ Thus Evelyn, describing the ceremonies on the occasion of the proclamation of James II., says that at Bromley the king’s health was ‘drunk in a flint glasse of a yard long.’ Some time before this, in 1669, on the occasion of a visit to the glass-house at Blackfriars, the same writer mentions the ‘singing glasses’ that he there had made for him, and which ‘make an echo to the voice ...’ but ‘were so thin that the very breath broke one or two of them.’ At a later time trumpets were made of glass, and some of these have survived. But few examples, however, of what may be called miscellaneous glass of an earlier date than the seventies of the eighteenth century have been preserved. It was about this time that a great change must have come over the manufacture, though on this point we have strangely little direct information. This period, we know, was a critical one in the history of the minor arts both in England and in France. In the latter country, the simpler and more classical style associated with the reign of Louis XVI. replaced the more unrestrained forms of the _Louis Quinze_ period some years before the death of the latter king. In England we see the new shapes first in the work of the silversmith about the year 1770, and soon after they are well represented in the Chelsea-Derby porcelain. In the case of glass this change is above all to be associated with the increased use of facetting. Flat facets divided by obtuse angles may indeed be found at times on the stems and shoulders of drinking-glasses almost from the commencement of the century. But now these facets take a purely geometrical form. The dishes and basins of the time simply bristle with sharp-pointed pyramids, so that these heavy, solid vessels can scarcely be lifted with impunity.