“O sweet Lady! cast aside,
  With a gentle, noble pride,
  All to sin or pain allied! 
  Let the wild-eyed conqueror wear
  The bloody laurel in his hair! 
  Let the black and snaky vine
  Round the drinker’s temples twine! 
  Let the slave-begotten gold
  Weigh on bosoms hard and cold! 
  But be THOU forever known
  By thy natural light alone!”

One of the best judges of pearls that ever lived, out of the regular trade, was no less a person than Caesar.  He was a great connoisseur, and could tell at once, when he took a pearl in his hand, its weight and value.  He gave one away worth a quarter of a million dollars.  Servilia, the mother of Brutus, was the lady to whom he made the regal present.

Caligula, not satisfied with building ships of cedar with sterns inlaid with gems, had a pearl-collar made for a favorite horse!  Pliny grows indignant as he chronicles the luxury of this Emperor.

“I have seen,” says he, “Lollia Paulina, who was the wife of the Emperor Caligula,—­and this not on the occasion of a solemn festival or ceremony, but merely at a supper of ordinary betrothals,—­I have seen Lollia Paulina covered with emeralds and pearls, arranged alternately, so as to give each other additional brilliancy, on her head, neck, arms, hands, and girdle, to the amount of forty thousand sesterces, [L336,000 sterling,] the which value she was prepared to prove on the instant by producing the receipts.  And these pearls came, not from the prodigal generosity of an imperial husband, but from treasures which had been the spoils of provinces.  Marcus Lollius, her grandfather, was dishonored in all the East on account of the gifts he had extorted from kings, disgraced by Tiberius, and obliged to poison himself, that his grand-daughter might exhibit herself by the light of the lucernae blazing with jewels.”

Nero offered to Jupiter Capitolinus the first trimmings of his beard in a magnificent vase enriched with the costliest pearls.

Catherine de Medicis and Diane de Poitiers almost floated in pearls, their dresses being literally covered with them.  The wedding-robe of Anne of Cleves was a rich cloth-of-gold, thickly embroidered with great flowers of large Orient pearls.  Poor Mary, Queen of Scots, had a wonderful lot of pearls among her jewels; and the sneaking manner in which Elizabeth got possession of them we will leave Miss Strickland, the biographer of Queens, to relate.

“If anything farther than the letters of Drury and Throgmorton be required to prove the confederacy between the English Government and the Earl of Moray, it will only be necessary to expose the disgraceful fact of the traffic of Queen Mary’s costly parure of pearls, her own personal property, which she had brought with her from France.  A few days before she effected her escape from Lochleven Castle, the righteous Regent sent these, with a choice collection