The building of St. Mark’s in Venice, begun in 1159, gave impetus to Italian glass manufacture. With the fall of Constantinople nearly a half-century later, many Greeks, skilled artists in glass, undoubtedly made their way to Venice and took thither the secrets of their trade. Certain it is that the early glass-workers of Venice and of Murano, where later the glass industry centered, gave curious and interested study to the old mosaics of the ancients and in due course rediscovered the art of millefiori and perfected it in a manner that would have caused the Romans to open their eyes in astonishment. We must not forget that with the ancients a crystalline glass was of great rarity, though colored glass was common enough. Thus the crystalline products of the Venetians were an achievement reserved for later centuries, and this white glass, in combination with the colored glasses was so skilfully employed by the workmen and artists of the Murano glass factories that nothing has surpassed the Venetian products in millefiori for sheer ingenuity and beauty. Often, of course, millefiori work was carried to the extreme of becoming less a thing of beauty than a tour de force. However, the collector will find interest in all pieces of the sort, and their range was enormous. The glass of Venice was famous for its extraordinary lightness and this added to its vogue. The Chaplain of Louis XIV, Réné François, amusingly warned the world that Murano was filling Europe with its fantasies of glass; but rare enough are the early specimens of Venetian manufacture, more precious now than their weight in gold. After all, there must always remain the zest of the chase in the spirit of the true collector, without which wonderful finds would never have been made, though we need not to go to the extent of the Countess of Fiesque, a lady of Louis XIV’s court. This lady died at Fontainebleau in great poverty at an advanced age. Historians of the gossip of the day have laid her indigent circumstances at the door of the rascally man of business, but I fancy her passion for mirrors had something to do with it. When almost in need of bread she astonished her friends by purchasing an enormously expensive mirror. “I had a piece of land,” she said in extenuation, “which brought me in nothing but corn. I sold it, and the money procured this mirror. Have I not managed wonderfully to possess this beautiful glass instead of dull corn?” Doubtless the countess did manage wonderfully; contentment is a great thing!