290 NATURAL HISTORY OF PRECIOUS STONES, &c.
plausible
story accounting to the sceptical few for the presence of a Tessei of
such inestimable cost upon the humble table where the Passover was
celebrated. It figured at the time among the bànqueting-plate of King
Herod, and had been forwarded to Jerusalem, whither it was his
intention to come from Galilee to keep the Feast : but the King having,
by Divine interposition, altered his mind, his dinner-service was
unceremoniously borrowed for their Master's use by the Disciples.
Gesner relates that a monastery near Lyons still (in 1565) boasted of
an opposition Emerald dish, according to them the only authentic one,
but much smaller and far less famed than the relic at Genoa. This
celebrated dish had been assigned to the Eepublic at the capture of
Caesarea 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
(38,400t), 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 patera of
a transparent rich green substance, believed through all those ages to
be a single Emerald of incalculable 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,
weighing 29 pounds, of the Abbey Eichenau, near Costanz, the gift of
Charlemagne, turned out, says Easpe, when critically examined in the
last century, a counterfeit of the same kind. Such also was, without
doubt, the renowned " Table of Solomon," found by the Arab invaders in
the Gothic treasury at Toledo, which Elmacin
