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Murrhina, China-Agate

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MURRHINA.
187
included under the name ; all that was required being that the material should be clouded with various colours, and not present the regular stratification of the Onyx. In fact, they were exactly the same as the Agate bowls still imported from India, where the manufacture seems to be even yet going on, though in a languishing condition. At the sack of the palace at Delhi in 1858, whole chestfuls of such Agate vases, having fallen a prey to soldiers less intelligent than the captors of Talaura, are said to have been wantonly destroyed.
From the first dawn of the Eenaissance these ancient gem-vases were eagerly sought after by the wealthy Italians, and imitated by their own artists, and the prices paid for them remind us faintly of the Roman extravagance in this particular. The Agate vases belonging to the French Crown were valued in the last century at half a million of francs. Their selling-price at the present day, however, is greatly fallen; they, indeed, fetch much less in London than their first cost in India.
That many of the Roman drinking-cups in coloured glass were designed as imitations of the Murrhina is manifest from their shape, that of a shallow bowl, a form adopted of necessity by the former, but by no means indispensable to the latter substance. Though in many of these bowls the glass-worker has contented himself with exactly repro­ducing the dark-brown, the chocolate-colour, and the white clouds of the original, yet as frequently has he aimed at surpassing Nature by mixing up the most brilliant tints his laboratory supplied in elegant waves and concentric circles.
It is very probable that such vases were imported ready made from India, as we are informed that the Crystallina were : that they were then extensively used by the Indian princes, appears from the exaggerated account Philostratus gives of the dimensions displayed by the various vessels in
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