politeness which make the payment of their modest demands a pleasure. I have in mind now a sturdy and hearty oarsman, rich with more or less authentic gossip of those whom he has seen and of those whom he has served, and as proud of his position of a Bellaggio peasanta leader among the bassi genti-as he would be of ducal honors if he wore them. He has sat face to face, and has chatted familiarly, with thousands of men and women of every rank that travels; yet he carries himself with the dignity of conscious worth, and with the grace and native elegance of an Italian peasant. We crossed the hills to Lugano in the coupé of a diligence in a light rain, which, as our occasional glimpses of the Simplon and the Bernardino showed, was the first autumn snow on the higher mountains. Still in the rain we sailed down the beautiful mountain lake to the town of Lugano. This journey was made interesting and memorable by one of those sudden and charming companionships which spring up in the fertile soil of a traveller's experiences. We parted at the pier, and may never meet again, but our memory of this lovely Italian-Swiss lake will always recall this genial and congenial Briton. It would be aside from my purpose to detail our experiences at Lugano and on Lago Maggiore. They continued and they varied the impressions received on Garda, and made eternal on Como. It is almost futile to write fresh lines at this late day of what has delighted the scribes of all times. Even in the first century of our era, the younger Pliny wrote to his friend Caninius Rufus: "What are you doing at Como? Do you study, hunt, or fish, or all three together? For on our beloved lake one can do all these. Her waters afford fish, her wooded heights game, and her deep solitude quiet for study. But whatever you do, I envy you, and I can not restrain the confession that it makes my heart heavy not to be able to share that with you for which I pine as a sick man for a cooling drink, a bath, or a living spring. Shall I tear with violence these closely fitting bonds, if no other solution is possible? Ah! I fear never. For before old occupations are ended, new ones are thrust upon me, and thus link after link is added to the chain of endless toil which holds me here enthralled. Farewell." From Pliny's time to ours the literature of all lands has lingered over these lovely lakes. Our route led us to Milan, where we were favored with that rare clear atmosphere which reveals to the Lombard plain one of the most majestic of the world's sights. The Venetian Alps, the peaks of the Carinthian range, the great Dolomites, the Gross Glöckner, the Oetler, the entire range of Swiss peaks to Mont Blanc, with seven-peaked Monte Rosa in the foreground, the Cottian Alps, with their pyramidal Monte Viso, the Maritime Alps, the Apennines, and the Euganean Hills, near Padua, closed almost the entire horizon with the grandest mountain chain of Europe. This view in its entirety is rarely seen. Nor was our good fortune evanescent, for no cloud, no slightest film of vapor, came to screen this glorious panorama from all our long road to Turin. Throughout the whole day the grand army of mountain-tops marshalled itself for review, the majestic peaks marching slowly to their ever-changing positions as we sped swiftly on our way. The rich irrigated sub-Alpine plain was their parade-ground, and against the broad blue banner of an Italian sky stood the sharp outlines of their icy helmets. As the daylight died away, the red glory of the Alpine glow still lifted them out of the coming night. Turin was for us only a halting-place, and not even the splendor of its famed Superga could delay us. We hastened on to those grim valleys where, resisting the wicked might of man, the children of God through so many sad centuries withstood the fiercest persecutions of Rome, and handed down unspoiled from generation to generation the stern hard faith of the pure Apostolic Church. As the assumptions and encroachments of Rome turned the power of the Church to the worldly aggrandizement of its rulers, those who held to the primitive faith were forced to seek shelter in obscurity. The rugged mountain valleys on the borders of Piedmont and Dauphiny became their ultimate retreat. Here, long before the protest of Luther, they held the torch of the ancient faith which he labored to restore. Here was the birth-place of Romish persecution, and here were concentrated, from 1308 to the downfall of the Inquisition, all the horrors of which fiendish fanaticism has been capable. Once, and once only, was the last remnant of this chosen people driven from these valleys to the refuge of Calvinistic Switzerland; but their Glorieuse Rentrée under Arnaud re-established the old faith in the ancient seat, whence, to this day, it sends its evangelists to every corner of Italy. It is of the persecutions of this people that Milton wrote his grandest sonnet: "Avenge, O Lord! Thy slaughter'd saints whose bones Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold: E'en them, who kept Thy truth so pure of old, When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones, Forget not in Thy book record their groans, Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll'd Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they To heaven. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway The triple tyrant, that from these may grow An hundredfold, who, having learnt Thy way, Early may fly the Babylonian woe." PAINTED GLASS IN HOUSEHOLD DECORATION. decoration was never attraction to catch the The deep the subject of more ardent inquiry and pursuit than in the present day. Furniture, stuffs, silks, paper-hangings, carpets, tapestry, glass, metal-work, china, the ornaments and accessories of the table-argentum et marmor vetus, æraque et artes-lie before the eye of the seeker after æsthetic surroundings in a bewildering variety of styles. The Mediæval, the Louis Quatorze, the Queen Anne, the Chinese and Oriental, in their varieties, the Grecian, the Etruscan, and all the free Christian modes and fashions, are ransacked either to furnish relics or to provide means of inspiration to the artists who are decorating our halls, salons, boudoirs, flats, mansions, and cottages of every degree. Among these efforts for obtaining lasting rather than ephemeral embellishment, and for rendering ornament conducive to instruction," it need occasion no surprise to learn that the ancient and longapproved method of decoration furnished by painted glass is again taking its proper rank. Certainly the translucence of glass enables the art-collector, if he carefully and fittingly use it, to surpass all the other decorations of his room in special attractiveness. The window being the opening to admit light, is always the first warmth of the ruby, the tender contentment of the sapphire, the glow and coruscation of the amethyst, the brilliancy and cheerfulness of the emerald, the glitter and distinctiveness of the diamond, may all be summoned to the satisfaction of the least cultivated eye by the infinite wealth of the glass-stainer's art. Eastlake conjectured that the increase of color in shade which is so remarkable in the Venetian and early Flemish pictures may have been suggested by the rich and fascinating effects of the light modified by the slight shading on the stained glass through which it was transmitted. When the making of window-glass first came into practice is not even now absolutely certified. The Roman windows were filled with a semi-transparent substance called lapis specularis, a fossil of the class of mica, which readily splits into smooth laminæ, or plates, as every stove-owner probably knows. Glass, both white and colored, opaque and transparent, was made by the Egyptians upward of 3000 years ago, and perfected for certain uses, as the Cesnola treasures establish, by the Egypto-Phoenicians who worked in the isle of Cyprus. Until, however, the commencement of the Christian era, the material does not appear to have been PAINTED GLASS, CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL. applied to any other purpose than the formation of various utensils and ornaments, of mosaic works, and the counterfeiting of precious stones. The Romans combined the most brilliant colors in their mosaics; and there can be little doubt that those mosaics gave the first idea of painted or stained glass for windows in the early Christian churches. St. John Chrysostom and St. Jerome speak of "windows of divers colors," and Leo the Third is said to have adorned the windows of the Lateran with colored glassthe earliest instance of the kind that can be cited with confidence. In the Abbey Church of St. Denis, in France, there are remains of glass windows in color which are supposed to have been the work of Abbot Suger, in the middle of the twelfth century. The first painted glass executed in England was in the time of King John; and it is in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, during which Norman architecture was best advanced, that the rich and superb illustrations of glass-painting were first presented. Specimens in Canterbury Cathedral which have never been surpassed remain to this day. The colors at these periods were vivid and positive. "There was no spot left for the eye to rest upon; no neutral tints nor secondary colors were introduced. The whole of the ground and foliage was filled with intense color, ruby and blue invariably preponderating. The old windows in Strasburg Cathedral illustrate this remark. The leading forms were massive and simple, consisting chiefly of the circle and the square, filled up with foliated ornament. The figures, though correct in costume, were of wrong proportion, vivid in coloring, the outline being defined by the thick strong lines of the lead, resembling those highly titled personages represented on the old-fashioned packs of cards." Some of the particulars of the manufacture of glass used for glass-painting may be interesting here. Mr. Winston's Inquiry touching Ancient Glass will furnish us with sufficient details for our purpose, as no writer on the topic of painted glass is more reliable, or has to such an extent facilitated investigation into this interesting art. The glass used in glass-paintings is, in its original manufactured state, either white or colored. The ingredients of white glass, of which silex and alkali are the most important, are incorporated by fusion in the melting-pot of the glass-house, having been in general previously "fritted," i. e., roasted with a strong fire in order to facilitate their union. When the vitrification in the melting-pot is complete, the glass is formed into sheets. These are afterward annealed, i. e., suffered to cool very gradually-a process which renders them less brittle; and they are then ready for use. Colored glass is of two kinds. One kind is colored throughout its entire substance, and is called pot-metal glass; the other is colored only on one side of the sheet, and is termed covered or coated glass, i. e., white glass covered with a coat of pot-metal color. Red or ruby glass is almost invariably coated glass; other kinds of colored glass are generally pot-metal glass, but they are not unfrequently manufactured as coated glass. Colored glass is formed by adding a certain quantity of coloring matter (metallic oxide) to the materials of white glass, and incorporating these ingredients by fusion in the melting-pot of the glasshouse. It is manufactured into sheets in the same way as white glass, and is of the same transparency. The glass-painter possesses the power of coloring white glass, and even of varying the tints of colored glass by the use of stains and enamel colors. All shades of yellow, to a full orange red, may be imparted to white glass by the use of silver for staining it; other colors are produced by means of enamels. A stain penetrates the glass to some little depth, and is properly as transparent as white glass itself. An enamel color only adheres to the surface of the glass, without penetrating it, and is always more or less opaque. There are three distinct systems of glass-painting, which may be termed the mosaic method, the enamel method, and the mosaic-enamel method. PAINTED GLASS-STRASBURG CATHEDRAL. The ings are composed of white glass-if they are meant to be white, or only colored with yellow, brown, and black-or else they are composed of different pieces of white and colored glass, arranged like a mosaic, in case they are intended to display a greater variety of colors. pieces of white glass are cut to correspond with such parts of the design as are white, or white and yellow, and the colored pieces with those parts of the design which are otherwise colored. The glass-painter in the mosaic style uses but two pigments-a stain which produces a yellow tint, and a brown enamel called enamel brown. The main outlines of the design are formed, when the painting is finished, by the leads which surround and connect the various pieces of glass together, and the subordinate outlines and all the shadows, as well as the brown and black parts, are executed by means of the enamel brown, with which color alone a work done according to the mosaic system can be said to be painted. The yellow stain is merely used as a color. Under the mosaic method each color of the design, except yellow, brown, and represented by a separate A limited number of col Of these the most simple is the mosaic black, must be method. Under this system glass-paint-piece of glass. Vol. LIX.-No. 353.-42 |