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Beryllus, Beryl

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BERYLLUS.
53
sold for the European market, the inferior samples when thus painted being deemed good enough for the native jewellers' work.
Antique engravings in Beryl are almost as rare as in the true Emerald ; * but with this difference, that intagli in the former stone, as far as my experience goes, belong to an earlier period of the art, being for the most part fine work of the "perfect" Greek school, whereas intagli in the Emerald are invariably in the later Roman style, dating from Hadrian's time and his immediate successors. To quote a few of the finest, where too the material is hardly to be distinguished from the pale Sapphire. The earliest is the Taras (or Icadius) on the dolphin, in the (former) Praum Collection, the design of which is placed by Winckelmann in the first class of Etruscan work ; a head of Proserpine in the purest Sicilian Greek style, and a hippocampus (Marlborough Gems) ; and amongst the best specimens of Roman date, the young Hercules, inscribed ÃÍÁÉ02, the patron-god, and favourite prœnomen of the Scipios (Blacas), with a most elegant design of Cupid borne over the waves by a dolphin (Craeherode). The grandest in­taglio extant of the Roman period is also upon an Aquamarine of the extraordinary magnitude of 2-1/2 x 2-1/2 inches ; the bust of Julia Titi, signed by the artistRor
nearly a thousand years it formed the knosp of a golden reliquary celebrated as " l'escrain de Charlemagne," pre­sented by Charlemagne to the Abbey of St. Denys, in which it was set with the convex back uppermost, being regarded as an invaluable Emerald. The rarity of such Beryl intagli, when of unquestionable antiquity, is readily
* This stone has been the vehicle for carrying down to us the fame of one of the only five gem-engravers noticed by ancient writers now extant. Addœcis (the court poet of Polemo, who was made King of Pontus by Antony), lias immortalized a work of " Tryphou's " in Beryl, the Nymph Galène, in a very graceful epigram. (Anth. ix. 544.)
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