THE KOH-I-NUR. 133
than £8,000. The Prince Consort, who took the greatest
interest in the operation, and whose sound advice had probably
prevented a total failure, openly expressed his dissatisfaction with
the work.
On
the treatment which the " Koh-i-Nur" received in the cutter's hands,
King is very severe, remarking that owing to the flattened and oval
figure of the stone, the brilliant pattern selected by the Queen's
advisers "entailed the greatest possible amount of waste." He adds that
Mr. Coster would have preferred the drop form, but that " in a
historical relic like this, the sole course that would have recommended
itself to a person of taste, was the judicious one pursued some years
before by Messrs. Rundell and Bridge, in their re-cutting of the
'Nassak,' both in its native and artificial figure. In this, by
following the trails of the Hindoo cutter, amending his defects, and
accommodating the pattern to the exigencies of the subject matter, they
transformed the rudely-facetted, lustreless mass, into a diamond of
perfect brilliancy, at the sacrifice of no more than ten per cent, of
its original weight."
It
may also be remarked that, although said to be cut as a brilliant, this
great Oriental talisman is really only such in name, being much too
thin to have satisfied the Jeffries, Ralph Potters, and the other great
dealers of the last and beginning of the present century. In fact the
cutting of the " Koh-i-Nur "on this occasion, revealed the painful fact
that the art was then extinct in England, while even the Amsterdam and
Paris operators had lost much of, their former cunning. They followed a
system of mere
