These diamond-points, so often alluded to, were produced by splintering a diamond by the blow of a heavy hammer. Pliny adds a jeweller's story (probably invented to keep up the mystery of the business), that it was necessary first to macerate the stone in goat's blood, and that even then it often split both the anvil and the hammer. These little splinters were then fixed into the end of an iron tool (pretty much as a glazier's diamond is at present), and cut with ease into the hardest of the coloured gems,-"nullam non duritiem ex facili cavantes." The Naxian stone, also used by the ancients, both in cutting and in polishing gems, was our Emery, a combination of corundum and iron, and which is still exported for the same purposes from that island. To the present day the sole means employed by the Hindoos for polishing the hardest stones, even the diamond, is by rubbing them by hand upon an iron slab, covered with corundumpowder and oil, which explains the uneven manner in which the facets on Indian gems are always cut. The terebrarum fervor, or the rapidly-revolving drill, was of the greatest service to the ancient engraver; and this observation of Pliny's is fully borne out by the appearance of many intagli, especially of the majority of the figures upon the Etruscan scarabs, which were evidently produced by means of a blunt drill and emery-powder exclusively. In these, the whole design is carried out by the juxtaposition of a number of hemispherical hollows of various extent, touching and overlaying each other, by which inartificial method such extraordinary caricatures of man and beast were produced by the Etruscan artist. And their failure in the art of intagliocutting strikes us the more, and must, with the greater confidence, be ascribed to the imperfect mechanical means at their command, when we observe that the very rudest intagli, and those evidently the very first essays of the art,

appear on the base of scarabs, which are themselves cut out of the stone with the greatest skill and the most elaborate finish; often, also, set in jeweller's work, displaying the greatest taste and most perfect workmanship; all circumstances pointing out the scarab as the property of a person able to command the utmost efforts of the artistic skill of his period.

Some writers quote the Ostracias as being named by Pliny as employed in gem-engraving, and they still more absurdly suppose it to have been the bone of the cuttle-fish; but his words only imply that it was hard enough to scratch other gems, a circumstance the more remarkable, as it was only a species of sea-shell. Lippert, himself a gem-engraver, was of opinion that the instrument used by the ancients both cut and polished the stone at the same time, inferring this from the circumstance of so many rude and apparently unfinished intagli being as highly polished in the interior, as those completed in the most minute details, and of the most elaborate style of workmanship; but this argument does not seem to me altogether conclusive. It might have been that the ancients possessed some mode of polishing the intaglio, with very little trouble, by a merely mechanical process, which the lowest class of engravers, who worked entirely for the populace, were equally able to impart to their work, the most skilful artists. In Pliny's time the wheel does not appear to have been in use, otherwise he would certainly have mentioned so important an innovation, which, when once introduced, speedily drove all other means of engraving out of the lapidary's workshop, in consequence of the extreme facility and rapidity of its operation. Of the use of this

as

opinion that the wheel began to be first used under Domitian.

instrument we see abundant marks in the intagli of the Lower Empire; more especially are its effects observable in the letters occurring upon the gnostic amulets, where we find the square form of the characters usually employed, on account of the difficulty of cutting curved lines by an instrument revolving in a vertical plane, and consequently working forward on the surface presented to it, and in a straight direction. The rude Sassanian intagli (to be hereafter noticed) appear to have been universally cut by the wheel; and the artist must have employed but a single disk for the whole of his work, to judge from the fact, that all the lines composing his figures are precisely of the same thickness, and that usually very coarse. The wheel was probably introduced into Europe from the East, when the commerce in gems began to attain such considerable extent as we find it had done even in the time of Pliny; and the Persian conquests of Trajan, in the next century, must have greatly widened the relations between the two universal empires of Rome and Parthia. Down to the fall of the Empire, and even later, as we shall see (Cross of Lotharius), this instrument remained the sole means of engraving the barbarous productions of expiring taste. In the East, the mechanical processes have always been kept up in full perfection, from the Mahometan custom of wearing signets engraved on gems, often the hardest and the most precious that could be procured. I have seen Persian legends admirably cut on the finest Sapphire and the Ruby; and these long inscriptions formed in beautiful flowing curves, united in the most intricate cyphers, and adorned with flowers and stars, required as much taste and skill in their execution as the classical designs of the European artist. At the period of the Revival, the instrument, together with the art of gem-engraving, was again brought into Italy from the East, probably not before the time of Lorenzo de' Medici,

under whose patronage flourished Giovanni delle Carniole, the earliest gem-engraver of whom any trace can be found.

But to make one concluding remark on the antique method, it is my firm conviction, deduced from the appearance of the best and truly genuine intagli, that the artist having hollowed out his design to the requisite depth by means of the drill, and having completed all the details with the aid of the diamondpoint, afterwards disguised all traces of the instruments employed, by the high polish which he gave to the interior of his work; thereby producing that appearance so characteristic of true antique intagli, that soft and flowing outline, which leaves nothing angular or sharply defined, but rather makes the whole design appear to have been modelled by the most delicate touch in a soft and yielding material. So true is this, that one is frequently inclined to view an excellent antique work with suspicion as a modern paste, until the reality of the gem is tested by the file, so stronga na ppearance does it bear of having been produced at once by casting in a fused material, rather than of a design cut out by patient labour on the hardest and most refractory of substances.

On account of the extreme minuteness of detail observable

in many antique intagli, some writers on this subject have boldly asserted that the artists who executed them must have had some means of assisting the eye equivalent to our magnifying-glasses. In confirmation of this theory, a story is told of certain intagli found at Pompeii in company with a crystal lens, and they at once jump to the conclusion that this lens bad been employed in the engraving of these particular gems. But it is most probable that the supposed lens was nothing more than a crystal or pale amethyst, cut en cabochon, and prepared itself to be engraved on, a form of which innumerable instances occur among transparent stones both with intagli upon them and plain. A large pale amethyst

in my collection of a very spherical form, and in which the intaglio, a hippocampus, occupies but a small portion of the surface, acts, when properly applied, as a magnifying lens of great power, a quality which one cannot but suppose must in similar cases have attracted the notice of some of the ancient possessors of gems of this form. I have also seen an antique Greek ring set with a crystal or white paste, of a perfect lenticular form, which certainly, if found by itself, might very well have passed for an ordinary magnifying-glass. But Pliny, who mentions so carefully the various instruments of the engraver's art, and who possessed much more than a merely theoretical knowledge of the subject, would never have omitted this most important auxiliary both to the artist and the amateur, especially where he actually mentions that "the engravers, when their sight was fatigued by the excessive strain required in their work, refreshed their wearied eyes by looking at an emerald." Seneca, indeed, says (Nat. Quæst. i. 6), that glass globes filled with water make small and obscure letters seen through them appear quite legible and distinct; but he ascribes the magnifying power to the nature of the water, and gives no hint that this discovery had been applied to any useful purpose in his day. It has been thought that the ancient engravers directed the light from a small window, or from a lamp, so as to pass through one of these globes, and fall in a concentrated spot upon their work, in the same manner as is still practised by jewellers when working upon minute objects by lamp-light; and as the custom can be traced back for many centuries, there is a possibility of its having been handed down by the traditions of the trade from remote antiquity.

Engravers, however, actually execute their work with but little assistance from the magnifier, the chief use of which is to ascertain the progress made in the cutting of the design, and the sinking of the intaglio into the stone, by repeated