When
a dealer advertises diamonds to-day he appeals chiefly to the
commercial instinct. In the old days appeal was made to superstition.
But withal, there was infused in it an element of poetry entirely
lacking now. And there is evidence that poets were hired to sing the
praises of his beautiful treasures, by the old time dealer. After
descanting upon the natural glories of the stone, its magic virtues
were enumerated with such liberality, that no disease of the body or
the mind could entirely escape. To surround it with a rosy mist of
romance, he told, without caring much for facts, of the mysterious
far-away lands from which it came. One great writer informed his
readers that the most precious sapphire came from the land of the Turk
and an inferior kind from Libya, which was the Africa of the Greeks.
The diamond, being uncommon and little known in those days, escaped
much of the puffery given to other gems, but when later it came to more
general knowledge, many of the virtues hitherto ascribed to others were
transferred to it. Many pages would be filled were all the things it
could do enumerated. It would banish bad dreams due to stomach trouble;
promote purity and peace; ensure harmony between man and wife;
strengthen wedded love. In all this there was doubtÂless an element of
truth, for men find to-day, that the sage advice with which the ancient
dealer in precious stones closed his homily, " to give the diamond
freely," is conducive to peace and harmony.
Jewelers
were the quacks of the Middle Ages. For about every ill that human
flesh is heir to, they had a specific, and as the claims they made were
founded enÂtirely upon imagination, it often happened that one stone
