Puritanism had been very destructive of the glass paintings which had added so much glory of colour to mediaeval churches.  The art had begun to decline, from a variety of causes, at 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 in Magdalene College, and restored, in 1715, those in Queen’s College, Oxford, the work of Van Linge, which had been broken by the Puritans.[944] William Price painted, in 1702, the scenes from the life of Christ, depicted on the lower lights of Merton College Chapel.  They are ’weak as regards colour, enamel being used almost to the substitution