CALLOT’S PATRIOTISM.

When Cardinal Richelieu desired Callot to design and engrave a set of plates descriptive of the siege and fall of his native town, he promptly refused; and when the Cardinal peremptorily insisted that he should do it, he replied, “My Lord, if you continue to urge me, I will cut off the thumb of my right hand before your face, for I never will consent to perpetuate the calamity and disgrace of my sovereign and protector.”

INGENUITY OF ARTISTS.

Pliny asserts that an ingenious artist wrote the whole of the Iliad on so small a piece of parchment that it might be enclosed within the compass of a nut-shell.  Cicero also records the same thing.  This doubtless might be done on a strip of thin parchment, and rolling it compactly.

Heylin, in his life of Charles I., says that in Queen Elizabeth’s time, a person wrote the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Pater Noster, the Queen’s name, and the date, within the compass of a penny, which he presented to her Majesty, together with a pair of spectacles of such an artificial make, that by their help she plainly discerned every letter.  One Francis Almonus wrote the Creed, and the first fourteen verses of the Gospel of St. John, on a piece of parchment no larger than a penny.  In the library of St. John’s College, Oxford, is a picture of Charles I. done with a pen, the lines of which contain all the psalms, written in a legible hand.

“At Halston, in Shropshire, the seat of the Myttons, is preserved a carving much resembling that mentioned by Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting, vol. ii., p. 42.  It is the portrait of Charles I., full-faced, cut on a peach-stone; above, is a crown; his face, and clothes which are of a Vandyck dress are painted; on the reverse is an eagle transfixed with an arrow, and round it is this motto:  I feathered this arrow. The whole is most admirably executed, and is set in gold, with a crystal on each side.  It probably was the work of Nicholas Bryot, a great graver of the mint in the time of Charles I.”—­Pennant’s Wales.

In the Royal Museum at Copenhagen is a common cherry-stone, on the surface of which are cut two hundred and twenty heads!

A HINT TO JEWELERS.

“When the haughty and able Pope Innocent III. caused Cardinal Langton to be elected Archbishop of Canterbury in despite of King John, and compelled him to submit, to appease the latter and to admonish him, his Holiness presented him with four golden rings, set with precious stones, at the same time taking care to inform him of the many mysteries implied in them.  His Holiness begged of him (King John),” says Hume, “to consider seriously the form of the rings, their number, their matter, and their color.  Their form, he said, shadowed out eternity, which had neither beginning