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A celebrated English beauty of the eighteenth century, while
sojourning at the famous English watering-place, Bath, wrote on a
window-pane the following impromptu lines:
In vain, in vain is all you've said, For I'm resolved to die a Maid.
In answer to this a gentleman of her acquaintance cut this rejoinder, the idea being better than the rhyme:
The Lady who this resolution took, Wrote it on Glass to show it might be broke.
The
visitor who relates this states that on returning to Bath at a later
time, he found that the window-pane had been removed, and a new one
substituted. Did this mean that the vow had been broken?
The
use of rings set with natural diamond-points in a symbolical sense, as
in the case of the three interlaced rings forming the impresa of
Cosimo de' Medici, probably had to do with the ancient tradition that
the diamond conferred courage or even invincibility upon the wearer. It
is in this sense that this type, of ring is figured on the reverse of
certain " campaign medals " issued in commemoration of important
expeditions. Such is the medal struck for Henri II of France when, in
1554, he set out from Champagne to invade Flanders. On the reverse of
this medal there is within the ring a palm branch and an olive branch,
significant of an unconquerable soul and of victory. Across the bottom
of the hoop is a fish of a species very common in Flanders, on the head
of which is a crown, this apparently denoting the ruler of that land.
The diamond emphasizes
X-B S. D. C. in The Boston Chronicle, Feb. 17, 1769, from a copy in the Union League Club Library, New York City.
