The forerunners of Henry Vizetelly came from Venice[3] to England in the spacious days of Queen Elizabeth; and until the end of the seventeenth century were concerned in the manufacture of glass. One of them became connected with some works established at Lambeth in or about 1673 by George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham. The first sheets of blown glass for mirrors and coach-windows made in Great Britain came from those works, which Evelyn visited, as mentioned in his "Diary" But in the early part of the eighteenth century the Vizetellys became printers, and the family papers describe them as of "the parish of St. Bride's in the city of London." The Vizetelly, or Vizzetelli, of Elizabethan days having been called James (Jacopo), it became until recent years the family rule that the eldest son of the eldest son should bear that Christian name. Another name, given to daughters, was the Biblical one of Mehetabel, a survival, perhaps, of some family Puritanism in Commonwealth days. But if there were a Puritan, there was certainly no Jewish strain in the family, the men of which in the eighteenth century married girls with good old English names, some of them London born and others coming from counties as far away as Cheshire. Thus, although the Vizetellys seem to have never forgotten their origin and to have cultivated friendship with sundry notable Italians who settled in England, it is certain that, as generation followed generation, English blood predominated in their veins. The status of the eighteenth-century Vizetellys as printers is difficult to determine. They were apparently in fair circumstances, but the writer knows of no eighteenth-century book bearing their imprint. He believes they were associated in business with others whose names alone appeared. The first found actually trading in his own name was James Henry Vizetelly,[4] born in 1790, and son of James Vizetelly, "printer, of St. Bride's parish and of Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields." James Henry's eldest son, James Thomas George, was apprenticed to him as a printer; and his second son, Henry Richard, after acquiring a knowledge of the same trade, was placed first with Bonner and afterwards with Orrin Smith, two noted wood-engravers. He proved one of the latter's best pupils, and ultimately joined his brother James in the printing and engraving firm known as Vizetelly Brothers.