sapphires, and greene emeraults.”  Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in the mouths of the dead.  A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.  When the Huns lured the king into the great pit, he flung it away—­ Procopius tells the story—­nor was it ever found again, though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundred-weight of gold pieces for it.  The King of Malabar had shown to a certain Venetian a rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god that he worshipped.

When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII of France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to Brantome, and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light.  Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and twenty-one diamonds.  Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies.  Hall described Henry VIII, on his way to the Tower previous to his coronation, as wearing “a jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses.”  The favourites of James I wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane.  Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armour studded with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parseme with pearls.  Henry II wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-two great orients.  The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke of Burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls and studded with sapphires.

How exquisite life had once been!  How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration!  Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.

Then he turned his attention to embroideries and to the tapestries that performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of the northern nations of Europe.  As he investigated the subject—­ and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up—­he was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things.  He, at any rate, had escaped that.  Summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame, but he was unchanged.  No winter marred his face or stained his flowerlike bloom.  How different it was with material things!  Where had they passed to?  Where was the great crocus-coloured robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena?  Where the huge velarium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by white,