_Champagne Glasses._--There is, of course, no real reason why one kind of wine should be drunk from a glass of special shape and another from a totally different one, but once glass drinking vessels had become the vogue, this habit of specialising in the shape and size of glasses speedily became the fashion and crystallised into a custom which persists even to-day in our port, sherry, champagne, claret, and liqueur glasses. In the beginning there was a far greater diversity, for England in the eighteenth century was famous for the number (and potency) of its beverages and, speaking generally, each had its appropriate glass. Frequently, of course, there was little diversity of shape, the difference being in the nature of the ornamentation, which in a number of cases was specially devised to indicate the purpose of the glass. Thus an ale glass would be adorned with ears of barley or bunches of hops; a wine glass with vine leaves or bunches of grapes; a cider glass with sprays of apple blossom, and so forth. Champagne was, in the eighteenth century, a wine of comparatively recent introduction, and was drunk only by the rich and great. Probably at first no special glasses were used for it, the more elegant of those already in existence, presumably bell-shaped and air-stemmed, being pressed into the service, but about 1730 special glasses were made, with wide, shallow bowls, of the double-ogee variety and a baluster. They had knopped or double-knopped stems and domed feet. Sometimes, as might be anticipated, an air or opaque-twisted stem was employed, while the shape of the bowl varied towards the bell shape, in that it became hemispherical. Subsequently the bowl became elongated into [Illustration: FIG. 11.--SWEETMEAT GLASSES. ALE GLASSES. (From the Rees Price Collection, by permission of the Connoisseur.)] a narrow cone, the stems exemplifying the various patterns of the day--baluster, knopped, double-knopped, air-twisted, opaque-twisted, and drawn. In the later examples the elongation was so pronounced that the glasses approximated to the familiar flute shape. In these the stem is often faceted, the facets sometimes extending some considerable distance up the glass. The modern champagne glass, with a wide saucer-like bowl and a hollow stem, seems to be a sort of combination of the two. The wine being a rarity, the glasses are scarce, and the collector who unearths a genuine specimen of an early eighteenth-century champagne glass may esteem himself fortunate. The shallow glasses were so little known that a hundred years later, in 1832, Disraeli, writing to his sister, remarks: “We drank champagne out of a saucer of glass mounted on a pedestal of cut glass,” so that the form was evidently a novelty, at least to him.