The French seized this relic, as the crusaders had done in the twelfth century; but instead of conveying it from the church of San Lorenzo to the abbey of St. Denis (selon les regles), they most sacrilegiously sent it to a laboratory.  Instead of submitting it, with a traditional story, to a council of Trent, they handed it over to the institute of Paris; and chemists, geologists, and philosophers, were called on to decide the fate of that relic which bishops, priests and deacons had pronounced to be too sacred for human investigation, or even for human touch. The result of the scientific investigation was, that the emerald dish was a piece of green glass!

When England made the King of Sardinia a present of the dukedom of one of the oldest republics in Europe, and restitutions were making “de part et d’autre;” Victor Emmanuel insisted upon having his emerald dish; not for the purpose of putting it in a cabinet of curiosities, as they had done at Paris, to serve as a curious monument of the remote epoch in which the art of making colored glass was known—­(of its great antiquity there is no doubt)—­but of restoring it to its shrine at San Lorenzo—­to its guard of knights servitors—­to the homage, offerings, and bigotry of the people! with a republished assurance that this is the invaluable emerald dish, the ‘Sagro Catino,’ which Queen Sheba offered, with other gems, to King Solomon (who deposited it, where all gems should be, in his church), and which afterwards was reserved for a higher destiny than even that assigned to it in the gorgeous temple of Jerusalem.  The story of the analysis by the institute of Paris is hushed up, and those who would revive it would be branded with the odium of blasphemy and sedition; none now remember such things, but those who are the determined enemies of social order, or as the Genoese Royal Journal would call them, ’the radicals of the age.’—­Italy, by Lady Morning.

“THE PAINTER OF FLORENCE.”

There is an old painting in the church of the Holy Virgin at Florence, representing the Virgin with the infant Jesus in her arms, trampling the dragon under her feet, about which is the following curious legend, thus humorously described by Southey, in the Annals of the Fine Arts: 

  There once was a Painter in Catholic days,
      Like Job who eschewed all evil,
  Still on his Madonnas the curious may gaze
  With applause and amazement; but chiefly his praise
      And delight was in painting the devil.

  They were angels compared to the devils he drew,
      Who besieged poor St. Anthony’s cell,
  Such burning hot eyes, such a d——­mnable hue,
  You could even smell brimstone, their breath was so blue
      He painted his devils so well.

  And now had the artist a picture begun,
      ’Twas over the Virgin’s church door;
  She stood on the dragon embracing her son,
  Many devils already the artist had done,
      But this must outdo all before.