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Margarita, Pearl

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MARGARITA.
231
In all the portraits of the Sassanian kings the eye is imme­diately struck by the huge pearl hanging from the right ear, and which the artist, to judge from the care bestowed upon its repre­sentation, has evidently considered one of the most essential points in his image of the sovereign. His solicitude brings to our recollection the romantic tale so well related by that most amusing of chroniclers, Procopius (Bell. Pers. i. 4), concerning that pearl of unrivalled magnitude obtained at the urgent entreaty of king Perozes by the daring diver from the guardian­ship of the enamoured shark, but with the sacrifice of his own life. And how vividly does he bring before us the final catastrophe, when disappeared for ever from the world this inestimable miracle of nature : when the Great King, resplen­dent in all his jewels, at the head of his mail-clad chivalry, charged the flying hordes of the Ephthalite Huns, and, in the very moment of falling into the vast pitfall into which he had been entrapped by their feigned retreat (which engulfed him, his sons, and his bravest nobles), tore from his right ear this glory of his reign and cast it, before himself, into the abyss, there to be eternally lost amidst the hideous chaos of crushed man and horse—comforted in death with the assurance of thus cheating the foe of the most glorious trophy of their victory. Nor could the Huns, although stimulated to the search by the enormous offers of his Byzantine rival in similar ostentation, the Emperor Anastasius (who promised five hundredweight of gold pieces to the finder), ever succeed in recovering from the pit of death the so highly-coveted jewel.
As no two Pearls were ever found exactly alike, this circum­stance gave them their name of Unio (unique). Although the truly spherical were, as ever, the most prized, yet the pear-shaped were also admired. These were termed Elenchi. Ladies wore these suspended to their finger-rings, and two or three together as ear-drops, in which they were entitled Crotalia (rattles), from the musical sound they gave out as they clashed together. Even the poorer classes strove for such a distinction, holding that the Pearl served for a gentleman-usher to a woman in public (lictorem fœminaî). Similarly, in our day, the grand ambition of every Tuscan girl, however poor, is to get a neck­lace of many rows of pearls, no matter though ill-shaped or
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