examples have been found in England; these are surrounded by double or triple zones, showing in relief chariot-races or combats of gladiators. All are of late date, and are of no merit as works of art. On one, exceptionally perfect, found near Colchester, and now in the British Museum, above the two bands of reliefs showing the rival chariots rounding the critical point at the extremity of the _spina_, the inscription CRESCENS AVE—HIERAX VALE would seem to celebrate the victory of the first-named charioteer, but it may perhaps only express the hopes of Crescens’ backer. The moulded hollow glass of the Romans often calls to mind the red Samian pottery decorated with reliefs, to which it is, however, as a whole inferior in artistic merit. The material does not lend itself well to elaborate designs, and one misses the crisp outlines given to glass by the cutting-tool. There is generally an air as of a cheap and second-hand copy, which gives a very modern aspect to many of these moulded pieces, and this is above all the case when the glass is transparent.[33] CHAPTER IV THE BLOWN GLASS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE It is after all in the development of the art of blowing glass that the principal merit of the glass-workers, in the age immediately preceding our era, is to be found. By this method the real capabilities of the material, both practical and artistic, were first disclosed. The art was probably first practised on the Phœnician coast, perhaps at Sidon, not long after the time of Alexander. Beside the moulded flasks of which I have spoken above, there are others of plain globular form, with simple short necks, which we may perhaps look upon as among the earliest work of the Phœnician glass-blowers. Some of these are little more than spherical vesicles of the glass as it came from the blowing-tube. With these are associated certain plain spheres of thin glass of various colours, which may have been used as balls by jugglers, as mentioned in a passage in one of Seneca’s letters. But the balls of cool glass, mentioned by other writers, held in their hands by ladies in summer, must surely have been solid, like the spheres of rock crystal put to a similar use by the Japanese. The next step was to give the bulb of glass a ‘kick’ at the base, and to prolong the neck; we have then the type of the so-called lachrymatories, perhaps the commonest and best known form of classical glass.