74 NATURAL HISTORY OF PRECIOUS STONES, &c.
this
belief, that, having satiated his covetousness in the enjoyment of its
possession during his lifetime, he vainly sought to break through the
ordinance of fate, and to avert the concomitant destruction from his
family by bequeathing the stone to the shrine of Juggernaut for the
good of his soul and the preservation of his dynasty. But his
successors could not bring themselves to give up the baleful
treasure—each one, doubtless, acting on the maxim " après moi le deluge
;" but Destiny was too rapid in her movements for them: the last
Maharajah is now a private " gentleman about town," and the Koh-i-noor
was presented by Lord Dalhousie, in the name of the East India Company
(since, in its turn, defunct in disgrace), to Queen Victoria in 1850.
The Brahmin sage who studies the Book of Fate is probably not
dispossessed of his hereditary superstition touching the malign powers
of this stone when he thinks upon the so speedily following Russian
war, that completely annihilated the prestige of the British army, the
legacy of Wellington's successes, and upon the events of the Sepoy
mutiny, three years later, that caused the very existence of England as
a nation to hang for months upon the magnanimous forbearance of one man
: an ugly truth, however much we may affect to ignore it.
The
re-cutting of the Koh-i-noor (1862), though executed with the utmost
skill and perfection, as far as concerns the art, was by its very
nature a most ill-advised proceeding, for it has deprived the stone of
all its historical and mineralogical interest. As a specimen of a
gigantic Diamond whose native weight and form had been as little as
possible interfered with by art (for the grand object with the Hindoo
lapidary is the preservation of weight), it stood without a rival, save
the Orloff, in Europe. As it is, in the place of the most ancient gem
in the history of
