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Reminiscences
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THE ROYAL CLARENCE VASE.
William Hone, in his
"Day-Book" for 1831, says, "This superb glass vase, designed by
John Gunby, and exhibited at the
Queen's Bazaar, Oxford Street, London, is an
immense basin of copper, and its iron shaft or foot clothed with two
thousand four hundred pieces of glass, construct a vase fourteen feet
high and twelve feet wide across the brim, weighing upwards of eight
tons, and capable of holding eight pipes of wine. Each piece of glass
is richly cut with mathematical precision and beautifully colored; the
colors are gold, ruby, emerald, &c.; the colored pieces being cemented
upon the metal body and rendered air-tight. The exterior is a gem-like
surface of inconceivable splendor; on a summer afternoon it forms a mass
of brilliancy. The vase, by illumination of gas alone, glittered like
diamonds upon melted gold. Mr. Reingale says the human mind, in all of
its extensive range of thought, is not able to conceive a splendid glass
vase cut in a more elaborate and novel way. At the first sight one is
confounded with astonishment, and knows not whether what we see is real,
or whether on a sudden we have not been transported to another globe.
To England
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