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Smaragdus, Emerald

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SMARAGDUS.                                     313
remarks incidentally that " within these fifty years, since the Peruvian5 have been imported, the Oriental have greatly fallen in value : from half that of the Diamond to the quarter of the price." Cellini also, speaking of the antique gems he used to buy of the country-folks during his residence in Rome (from 1524 to 1527), in which line he boasts of having carried on a very lucrative commerce with the Cardinals and other wealthy patrons of art, mentions the having thus obtained an Emerald as large as a bean, exquisitely engraved with a dolphin's head.6 This stone was of such fine quality that, when re-cut, " it was sold again for as many hundreds of scudi as it had cost me tens." It must be noticed that Cellini was by profession a connoisseur in precious stones, and, above all, that a performance so excel­lent as he describes it, must have been antique, the art of gem-engraving having only been revived in Italy a few years before his own birth in 1500. And to wind up this list with a moral proof derived from Pliny's description of his best Smaragdus : " After the Diamond and the Pearl, the first place is given to the Smaragdus for many reasons. No other colour is so pleasing to the sight : for grass and green foliage we view indeed with pleasure, but Emeralds with so much the greater delight, inas­much as nothing in creation compared with them equals the intensity of their green. Besides they are the only gems that fill the eye with their view, yet do not fatigue it; nay, more, when the sight is wearied by any over-exertion, it is relieved by looking upon an Emerald. For gem-engravers no other means of resting the eye is so agreeable ; so effectually by their soft green lustre do they refresh the wearied sight." After reading this just panegyric, or the poetical comparison in Heliodorus :
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