geri_; and only escaped once a year! Millions knelt
before it, and the penalty on the bold but zealous hand that touched it
with a diamond, was a thousand golden ducats."

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 onc