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Smaragdus, Emerald

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SMARAGDUS.                                    321
one, but much smaller and far less famed than the one at Genoa. This celebrated relic had been assigned to the Republic at the capture of Cœsarea in 1101, as an equivalent for a large sum of money due from the Crusaders. The State pawned it in 1319 for 1200 marcs of gold (38,400Z.), and redeemed it again, a satisfactory evidence of their belief in the reality of the material as well as in its sanctity. It was a large dish of a transparent rich green substance, believed through all those ages to be a single Emerald of incredible value, but which the investigating incredulity of the French, when masters of the city, in 1800, at length tested, and found to be merely glass. Similarly the noted Emerald of the Abbey Eichenau near Costanz, the gift of Charlemagne, turned out, when critically examined in the last century, a counterfeit of the same kind. Such also was without doubt the famous " Table of Solomon," found by the Arab invaders in the Gothic treasury at Toledo, which Elmacin describes as a table of con­siderable size, one single piece of solid Emerald, encircled with three rows of fine pearls, supported upon 365 feet of gems and massy gold, and estimated at the price of 500,000 aurei.5
It may, however, be stated here that the antique glass Eme­ralds possess colour, lustre, and hardness in a degree far superior to the modern pastes. One found at Rome that had been re-cut and set in a gold ring eclipsed in beauty almost every real stone of the kind ever seen by me : in fact it is a usual practice there amongst the gem-dealers, on obtaining a fine green paste, to get it re-cut and facetted for a ring-stone, and as such to obtain a high price for it from the unwary dilettante. The Cingalese anxiously seek after the thick bottoms of our wine-bottles, out of which they cut very fine Emeralds, which they dispose of at high prices to the " steam-boat gentlemans," exactly as Garcias ab Horto, physician to the Viceroy of Goa, describes the Indians there as doing for the benefit of the Portuguese, three centuries
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