_Cordial and Strong Waters Glasses._--The art of distillation came from Arabia, as the name alcohol (al Kohl) indicates. Northern peoples, however, for a long time preferred, to the distilled products, cordial waters made from honey, fruit syrups, spices, and various herbs. Each notable housewife had her own recipes for cordials, and many and quaint were the products that came from the family still-room. It was not, indeed, until comparatively recent times that the habit of spirit-drinking made any great headway in England. Whisky was made in Ireland in the fourteenth century, and must consequently have been known in England. Howell in his “Letters” refers to the _usquebaugh_ of Ireland, but remarks that “whereas in England they drink it in aqua vitæ glasses, in Ireland they drink it in beer glasses.” The quotation proves that even at that early period special glasses for spirits were in use. Greene, some thirty years later, includes among the glasses he ordered from Venice small glasses marked for _brandj_. The taste was probably intensified after the Revolution of 1688 brought numbers of Dutchmen into the country. The glasses employed were, generally speaking, miniature replicas of the wine glasses in vogue; others are short-stemmed, and as this did not lend itself to air-twisting, the baluster type was mostly affected, which in such small glasses gives a peculiarly massive appearance. Opaque-twisted stems are, however, more frequently met with, as are fluted ones. Sometimes the bowls are fluted or faceted. The dumpy, thick-stemmed, wide-bowled cordial glasses are often termed “Hogarth” glasses, they being the prevailing type in his pictures. The modern equivalents are the “firing” glasses used at Masonic banquets, the members after each toast knocking the glasses in unison on the table--the sound produced being fancifully likened to the reports of guns. Figs. 1 and 2 (p. 160) are illustrations of firing glasses, the former being antique and the latter modern and strictly utilitarian. Not all cordial and strong waters glasses belong to this type. Some of the most valuable have long stems, either plain or opaque-twisted. Many of the latter, however, came from the Netherlands and stand outside the category of English glasses. The “thistle” glass has come to be the recognised Scottish liqueur glass. The form originated, it is believed, in Bohemia, but once it had made its way here, it was natural that the Scots should take for their national liquor the glass that bore the form of their national emblem. At any rate the beginning of the Scottish glass industry was marked by the production of a thistle glass, which was made at the factories in Edinburgh.