Another corroboration of this opinion is the fact of many glass vessels being found, both entire and broken, which are very good imitations of striped Agates; and Pliny expressly mentions, amongst the varieties of coloured glass made in his day, one imitating the Murrhine.

The most splendid Agate vase in existence is the twohandled cup, carchesium, of the capacity of a sextarius (above pint), and covered with Bacchanalian subjects, presented by Charles the Bald, in the 9th century, to the Abbey of St. Denis, and which was always used to hold the wine at the coronation of the kings of France. In this case, then, we trace a Murrhine cup almost up to the days of the Roman Empire; and, from the style of art displayed upon it, the vase might, without hazard, be ascribed to the epoch of Nero himself. We may conclude, from Pliny's mode of expression, that, although flat saucers of Murrhine were not uncommon, the thinness of the slabs of the stone made a scyphus, or deep hemispherical bowl, an extraordinary rarity; for, among the show of Nero's vases in the Palace-garden theatre "were the broken fragments of one scyphus preserved in a case with as much care as the corpse of Alexander the Great, and exhibited to the public to excite, I suppose, the grief of the age, and to cast odium upon fortune!"

At the present day we might still say with Pliny, "The East sends us Murrhine vases.' Collections of Agate vases formed in India frequently occur in the auctions of articles of virtù in London, where they still fetch high prices, though

7 This cup bore upon its setting the legend added at the time of its donation to the abbey by Charles :

"Hoc vas Christe tibi devota mente dicavit

Tertius in Franco sublimis regmine Carlus." It was stolen in Feb. 1804 from the

Museum, and the ancient setting of

gold enriched with precious stones melted down by the thieves; but the vase itself was fortunately recovered undamaged, and has been remounted in an elegant style by Delafontaine.

by no means equal to those paid for them in their native country. It was grievous to read of the amount of skill, labour, and value, annihilated in a moment, when, at the recent sack of the palace of Delhi, our soldiers, with the brutal love of destruction that characterises John Bull, smashed chests upon chests full of these elegant productions. Had they been preserved and sent to England they would have added largely to the amount of prize-money, being worth considerably more than their weight in gold.

ALABASTER.

This stone was originally known as the Onyx, a name afterwards exclusively appropriated to the gem still called by that name. From the description of it given by Pliny it must have been the stone now known as the Oriental Alabaster, "being of the colour of honey, variegated with spiral spots, and opaque." It came from Arabia and Egypt, but the best sort of it from Carmania. It was at first only used for making drinking-cups, but soon became so plentiful at Rome that Pliny mentions columns thirty-two feet long formed of it, and also a dining-room of Callistus (a freedman of Claudius) adorned with more than thirty such pillars. The columns and pilasters presented by Mahomet Ali to the building of the church of S. Paolo-fuori-le-Mura at Rome are above forty feet in length, of a single block each, and of the most beautiful quality. This stone is often of a rich brown mixed with lemon-colour; and this kind is quarried to a large extent at Volterra, where it is worked up into those elegant vases of colossal size now often to be seen in the London shops. Pliny says that it received the name of Alabaster from its being used to make the little jars for holding perfumes, which were called alabastra as being

shaped like an amphora without handles; hence the stone of which they were commonly made got the designation of Lapis Alabastrites. These perfume-jars are of common occurrence and of all sizes, both in this material and also in glass and pottery, but those of stone were thought to preserve the perfume better. Hence we see that St. Mark's "alabastrum unguenti nardi spicati" and the "nardi parvus onyx" of Horace meant the same thing. The "box of ointment" of the Jacobean translators gives an incorrect idea of the passage, an error due to their notions being biassed by the usages of their own times, when ointments, as at present, were solid compounds of lard, and necessarily kept in boxes for use; a mistranslation the more absurd when we consider the epoch and the country where the event recorded by the evangelist took place. But the unguenta of the ancients were merely scented oils obtained by macerating spices or flowers in olive oil, and thus obtaining their essence by pressure. The neck of the Alabaster vessel was broken off when its contents were required, as it had been hermetically sealed by the maker to prevent the evaporation of the scent. In the museum at Naples are shown some large Alabaster jars from Pompeii still retaining a strong perfume from their former contents, at which fact the Emperor Nicolas, on his visit, "rimase sorpreso," as well he might; at least so says the custode of the gallery. We find a large number of canopi, or sacred Egyptian vases, with a cover shaped like the head of a mummy, made of this stone. The commoner variety used. for these little vessels is exactly like that of Derbyshire worked up into similar forms at the present day. This stone deserves the name of Onyx much better than the gem to which, at a later period, the term was exclusively confined, for it is of the exact colour of the finger-nail, and shaded in the same manner. The Onyx vases already mentioned as

having, as well as Murrhine, been so degraded by Heliogabalus, must have been some elegant drinking-vessels of the Oriental Alabaster designed to adorn the tables of his more tasteful predecessors.

ROCK-CRYSTAL.

The Murrhine Vases naturally introduce the subject of those of Crystal, which were as much in fashion among the Romans as with their imitators, the wealthy Italians of the Cinque-Cento period. The ancients had a notion that this stone was only hardened ice, and hence its name, the Greek word for ice. This theory was supposed to be confirmed by the circumstance that their chief supply of Crystal was obtained from the Alps, where it still abounds in the moraine, or débris left by the glaciers. The Romans used it almost exclusively for making cups and vases. I have met with hardly any antique intagli in Crystal; no doubt its want of colour operated against its use as a ring-stone. The engravers of the Revival, on the other hand, often employed it for intagli, and executed some of their best works in this stone. Vasari especially praises the Crystals of Giovanni del Castel Bolognese, the most eminent of those early artists. Their engravings were not so much intended for signets as for personal ornaments, and to adorn articles of plate, where largeness of extent and transparency were rather recommendations than otherwise. Pliny mentions the lucrative fraud then common of staining Crystal so as to imitate Emeralds, Amethysts, and other coloured gems, but forbears to give the process, because even luxury, as he says, ought to be protected against imposition. Dutens, however, is less scrupulous; he asserts that a

8 Vasari names in particular the Tityus and the Ganymede engraved by him for Ippolito dei Medici.

8

Crystal heated and plunged into the tincture of cochineal, becomes a Ruby; into a mixture of turnesole and saffron, a Sapphire; and so on for the rest, always assuming the colour of the tincture into which it is plunged. Or the same end may be obtained by macerating the crystal for some months in spirits of turpentine, saturated with a metallic oxide of the required tint. I believe it much more probable that the ancients employed the more simple method now so much in use, and to which most of the Carbuncles of the London shops are due, and that is to cut the crystal to the proper form, and painting its back the required colour, so to set it in the piece of jewellery. The fact that ancient gems were usually set with a back to them, would greatly favour the execution of this fraud, to baffle which, in the case of the Chrysolithus for instance, Pliny expressly mentions that the stone was set open. Although the Roman jewellers made false Jaspers of three colours by cementing as many slices of different stones together, and hence its name Terebinthizusa, they do not seem to have been acquainted with doublets, the favourite device of the modern trade, by which a thin slice of real stone is backed by a facetted Crystal, and then so set as to conceal the junction. The ancient frauds in coloured stones were entirely confined to the substitution of pastes for the true, to detect which Pliny lays down many rules, some fanciful enough, but containing one that is infallible, that by means of a splinter of Obsidian a paste may be scratched, but not a real stone. We may as well conclude the subject of false gems, which falls appropriately under the head of the Crystal, so much used in their fabrication, by quoting the curious observations of Camillo Leonardo, of Pesaro, on the various frauds practised by the jewellers of his own times, 1502. Many of these are extremely ingenious, and the recipes for them doubtless handed down by tradition from remote ages.