ined-glass work is done by numerous hands, each trained in a
special skill--to design, or to paint, or to cut, or to glaze, or to
fire, or to cement--but none are taught to do all; very few are taught
to do more than one or two. How, then, can any either use rightful
liberty or observe rightful limitations? They do not know their craft,
upon which these things depend. And observe how completely also these
two things depend upon each other. You may be rightly free, _because_
you have rightly learnt obedience; you know your limitations, and,
_therefore_, you may be trusted to think, and feel, and act for
yourself.

This is what makes old glass, and indeed all old art, so full of life,
so full of interest, so full of enjoyment--in places, and right places,
so full even of "fun." Do you think the charming grotesques that fill up
every nook and corner sometimes in the minor detail of mediaeval glass or
carving could ever be done by the method of a "superior person" making a
drawing of them, and an inferior person laboriously translating them in
_facsimile_ into the material? They are what they are because they were
the spontaneous and allowed license and play of a craftsman who knew his
craft, and could be trusted to use it wisely, at any rate in all minor
matters.

THE LIMITATIONS OF STAINED-GLASS.

The limitations of stained-glass can only be learnt at the bench, and by
years of patient practice and docile service; but it may be well to
mention some of them.

_You must not disguise your lead line._ You must accept it willingly, as
a limitation of your craft, and make it contribute to the beauty of the
whole.

"But I have a light to do of the 'Good Shepherd,' and I want a landscape
and sky, and how ugly lead lines look in a pale-blue sky! I get them
like shapes of cloud, and still it cuts the sky up till it looks like
'random-rubble' masonry." Therefore large spaces of pale sky are
"taboo," they will not do for glass, and you must modify your whole
outlook, your whole composition, to suit what _will_ do. If you must
have sky, it must be like a Titian sky--deep blue, with well-defined
masses of cloud--and you must throw to the winds resolutely all idea of
attempting to imitate the softness of an English sky; and even then it
must not be in a large mass: you can always break it up with
branched-work of trees, or with buildings.

_There should be no full realism of any kind._

_No violent action must assert itself i