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AMULETS: ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, ORIENTAL 337
The
poets have sung the praises of the turquoise. In Shakespeare's Merchant
of Venice, when the "amorous Jessica" made off with her father's
jewels, Shylock particularly bewails the disappearance of his
turquoise, crying out that he would not have lost it for ' ' a
wilderness of monkeys. ' ' The poet Donne, also, writes of this stone
and draws attention to its sympathetic quality in these words :
As a compassionate turquoise that doth tell, By looking pale, the wearer is not well.
That
Queen Elizabeth clung fondly to life is well known, and it is said that
she trusted much in the virtues of a talisman which she wore round her
neck. This was a piece of gold engraved with certain mystic characters.
The statement has also been made that at the bottom of a chair in
which she often sat, was the queen of hearts from a pack of cards,
having a nail driven through the forehead of the figure.37 Could this have been a spell of witchcraft used against her hated rival, Mary of Scotland?
The
belief that turquoise changes its hue with the changing health of the
wearer leads an early seventeenth century author to offer it as a
symbol of wifely devotion, saying that "a true wife should be like a
turquoise stone, clear in heart in her husband's health, and cloudy in
his sickness." Although a more prosaic explanation than that of occult
sympathy has been proposed for this asserted change of hue, we need
not therefore reject the more poetic fancy.38
Among
the believers in the virtue of amulets must be counted the French
religious philosopher, Pascal. After his death in 1662 there was found,
sewed up in his pourpoint, a piece of paper bearing a long and very
strange inscription.
■ Agnes Strickland, " Lives of the Queens of England," vol. vii, pp. 770, 778.
"Alex.
Nicholes, "A Discourse of Marriage and Wiveing," 1615, BasL Misc. II,
180; cited in Lean's Collectanea, vol. ii, It. II, Bristol, 1903, p.
641. 22
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