d he offered me fourteen, which I took. The fact is," said
he, "no one is able to say for certain if a stone is antique or not. A.
has the best judgment in Rome, but you see how he is deceived." I bought
of the same man a small engraved emerald, which he had just purchased of
a peasant, and, without much examination, sold me for one scudo, as a
basso-impero of ordinary quality. My eyes were better, and had seen, in
what he thought a handful of flowers, a cross; and on cleaning it we
found it to be an early Christian stone of much greater value than he
supposed, to his great chagrin.

If the perfections of our Scarabaeus give us a glimpse of Etruscan
existence, we may perhaps gather from the gems some notion of what Rome
was, beyond what historians have written, or the ruins of her palaces
and tombs have shown. The quantity of intaglii alone, such as they are,
which are dug up in the gardens and vineyards around Rome every year, is
incredible to one who has not watched day by day the acquisitions of the
antiquity shops, and the stalls of the Piazza Navona. Very few of them
are of any artistic value; but the fact that so many were made use of is
a marvel in itself, and implies a greater luxury than marble palaces
even hint at. I one day remarked to a peasant who brought me some
intaglii to sell, that the ancients must have worn a great many rings;
and he replied, that in his country the richer people wore so many that
they had to hold their hands up to keep them from falling off. On
inquiry I found that he came from the Abruzzi, where it seems that the
people still hold on to something of the antique customs; for we know
that the Romans began the fashion of covering the fingers to that
extravagant degree, so that the number of rings possessed by a family of
great wealth must have been almost inestimable. At every irruption of
the barbarians, the villas that covered the Campagna for miles around
Rome must have felt the first fury of their ravages; and as the stones
contained in the ornaments were of no use to the plunderers, they were
broken out and thrown away, many of them to be uncovered, more than a
thousand years later, by the spade of the trencher in the vineyards. One
of a number of peasants playing at bowls in one of the roads near Rome
struck with his ball a point of hardened mud, which flew in pieces,
disclosing an exquisite intaglio head of Nero in carnelian, in perfect
condition, for which the finder received te