For the illustrations of several of the above pieces I am indebted to the courtesy of the late Mr J. T. Herbert Bailey. Such examples, which cannot fail to interest the lover of art as well as the collector of antiques, amply testify to the strides which glass manufacture had made in England, and are also useful as indicating the nature of the finds a collector may even yet make in out-of-the-way places, provided he will first take the precaution to acquire such knowledge of the characteristics of old glass as will serve to protect him from being deceived by modern reproductions. One does not, for example, expect to find engraving or cutting on early importations from Venice, or that the glasses made in commemoration of various events invariably bear appropriate inscriptions, by which they may be immediately identified. Sometimes there is a date alone, sometimes a figure or merely initials, and the collector’s imagination and historical knowledge, as well as his expert acquaintance with the qualities of old glass, are all called into play to determine the date and occasion when the specimen was produced. It need hardly be said that historical and commemorative glass are very widely imitated, the commonest and most plausible of the various forms of deception adopted being, as elsewhere suggested, to engrave some comparatively valueless specimen of real old glass with figures exactly imitating the genuine thing, and so giving it a fictitious value. [Illustration: FIG. 24.--TANKARDS AND GROG GLASSES. EARLY 18th CENTURY. (From the Rees Price Collection, by permission of the Connoisseur).] CHAPTER V BRISTOL AND NAILSEA GLASS It is a matter of regret that Bristol’s ancient fame for making and cutting glass should have so completely disappeared. In the palmy days of its glass industry it boasted no fewer than fifteen “glass-houses,” and it had no rival in the country either as regards the quantity or the quality of its output. This was in the year 1760. Thirty years later the first glass-maker appears on the roll of the city’s freemen. But seven years previously we read that a certain townsman was admitted a freeman of the city upon his undertaking to train a city schoolboy, as his apprentice, in the difficult art of glass “grinding” without the usual premium of £7. But as early as 1666 an order was made by the City Council to the effect that “no stranger or foreigner should presume to open a shop, _either with or without glass windows_, under a penalty of £5”--a fact which seems to indicate that, although glass windows may still have been a novelty, there existed facilities for their supply if required.