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THE BOOK OF THE PEARL
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be clean gone; then dry the powder of pearl upon warm embers, and keep it for your use.1
Through
their composition of carbonate of lime, pearls possibly possess some
slight therapeutic value, which, however, can easily be supplied by
other materials—as the shell, for instance—and is entirely out of
proportion to their market value as ornaments.
Although
pearls have lost their therapeutic prestige and no longer have a
recognized place in materia medica, their healing qualities are not to
be denied, for there are few ills to which women are subject that
cannot be bettered or at least endured with greater patience when the
sufferer receives a gift of pearls; the truth of which any doubting
Thomas may easily verify in his own household to the limit of his
purse-strings.
Owing
to their beauty and great value, pearls have been deemed particularly
appropriate as a sacrifice in enriching a drink for a toast or tribute.
Shakspere alludes to this in the words of King Claudius, the pearl
being frequently designated union in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries :
The
king shall drink to Hamlet's better breath ; And in the cup an union
shall he throw, Richer than that which four successive kings In
Denmark's crown have worn.2
It
is stated that a pearl worth £15,000 was reduced to powder and drunk by
Sir Thomas Gresham, the English merchant, in the presence of the
Spanish ambassador, as a tribute to Queen Elizabeth, by whom he had
been knighted.3
The
most celebrated instance of enriching a drink with a pearl was
doubtless Cleopatra's tribute to Antony, Pliny's account of which we
give in the words of old Philemon Holland :
This princesse, when M. Antonius had
strained himselfe to doe her all the pleasure he possibly could, and
had feasted her day by day most sumptuously, and spared for no cost: in
the hight of her pride and wanton braverie (as being a noble courtezan,
and a queene withall) began to debase the expense and provision of
Antonie, and made no reckoning of all his costly fare. When he thereat
demanded againe how it was possible to goe beyond this magnificence of
his, she answered againe, that she would spend upon him at one supper
ten million Sestertij. Antonie laid a great wager with her about it, and shee bound it againe, and made it good. The morrow after, Cleopatra
1 "A Queen's Delight," London, 1671, pp. ' W. J. Lawson, "History of Banking,"
75, 76.
London, 1850, pp. 24, 25.
* "Hamlet," Act V, sc. 2.
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