the beginning of the Reformation.
In Elizabeth's reign, few coloured windows of any note were executed.
Under James I. and Charles I. the taste to some degree revived. A new
style of colouring was introduced by Van Linge,[937] a skilful Flemish
artist, who appears to have settled in England about 1610, and found
many liberal patrons. It was an interval when much activity was
displayed throughout the kingdom in the work of repairing and
beautifying churches. When he died, or left the country, the art became
all but dormant. The Restoration did little to resuscitate it. Religious
taste and feeling were at a low ebb. Not only in England, but throughout
the Continent also, the glass painters had no encouragement, and were
continually obliged to maintain themselves by practising the ordinary
profession of a glazier. And besides, long after the time when painted
windows had become secure from Puritanic violence, a feeling lingered on
that there was something un-Protestant in them--something inconsistent,
it might be, with the pure light of truth. For many years more, few were
put up; nor these, for the most part, without much difference of
opinion, and sometimes a great deal of angry controversy.[938] It may
have stirred the irony of men who had no sympathy with these suspicions,
that corporations and private persons who would by no means[939] admit
into their churches windows in which scenes from our Saviour's life were
pictured in hues that vied with those of the ruby and the sapphire had
often no scruples in emblazoning upon them, to their own glorification,
the arms of their family or their guild.[940] Winslow speaking of the
east window[941] in University College, Oxford, done by Giles of York in
1687, the earliest example of a stained-glass window after the
Restoration, remarks how much the art had deteriorated even in its most
mechanical departments.[942] In the first quarter, however, of the
eighteenth century, there was some improvement in it. Joshua Price, in
the east window of St. Andrew's, Holborn, has 'rivalled the rich
colouring of the Van Linges. The painting is deficient in brilliancy,
and some of the shadows are nearly opaque; yet these defects may almost
be overlooked in the excellence of its composition, and in its immense
superiority over all other works executed between the commencement of
the eighteenth century and the revival of the mosaic system.'[943]
Joshua Price also executed some of the side windows