es of glass when he established the first glassworks at
Rome, the lamentation with which he took farewell of the world, '_qualis
artifex pereo_,' may have been inspired by regret at his not being
allowed time enough to develop them. Certainly such gigantic mirrors as
those which St.-Gobain has this year sent to the Exposition would have
shown to better advantage in his colossal 'Golden House' than in any of
our petty modern palaces. In what palace in England or in France to-day
could a mirror measuring 7 metres x 63 centimetres in height by 4 metres
x 12 centimetres in width, and thus displaying a surface of more than 30
square metres, be placed, without dwarfing everything about it? These
immense and magnificent mirrors must go hereafter to decorate palaces of
public resort--'palaces of the people,' not palaces of princes. What was
a royal luxury when Colbert wrote to D'Avaux in 1673 has become a
popular attraction. The smallest restaurant in Paris would think itself
discredited to-day were it decorated with one of the _grandes glaces_
for which Colbert in 1693 thought St.-Gobain would find no purchaser
save the king; but the Grand Cafe and the Hotel Terminus of the Gare
St.-Lazare order mirrors in 1889 which no king of our times would very
well know what to do with.

Yet, once more, how the cost of these mirrors has fallen! In 1702 a
plate-glass mirror showing two square metres only by surface, cost, at
St.-Gobain, 540 francs. In 1889 such a mirror, showing four square
metres of surface, costs, at St.-Gobain, 136 francs. A mirror showing
ten square metres of surface, which could not have been made in 1702 at
any price, can now be had for 467 francs!

In 1802, under Napoleon, a mirror showing four square metres of surface
cost 3,644 francs, or very nearly three times the present cost of a
mirror, not tinned like the mirrors of 1802, but silvered, of twice and
a half that size. While new markets are constantly opening to this great
industry all over the world, the progress of chemical science and of
mechanics is as constantly suggesting new economies and new improvements
in the manufacture of glass, and St.-Gobain, though one of the most
thoroughly French of all French 'institutions,' shows no Chauvinism in
its incessant study and prompt appropriation of these economies and
these improvements. During the invasion of 1814 the workmen of
St.-Gobain marched off to Chauny to resist the advance of the Prussians,
and the man