SEALS THEIR ORIGIN AND USES.

something from the Empress Livia, in other respects no model for the British matron, who so artistically concealed the ravages of time beneath drapery and a diadem. Many an obscure allusion in ancient authors has been illuminated by the pure ray serene emitted by a graven gem. The scholar will often find sermons in these stones, excelling the lucubrations of the commentators no less in clearness than in terse

SEALS are among the most venerable implements of civilised man. What the plough is in agriculture, the seal is in commerce and conveyancing. The Lacedæmonians are said to have been the first European people who used signets, which they shaped out of morsels of worm-eaten timber. In Greece, therefore, the woodworm was held to be the parent of the beau-ness; and he may sometimes be put right by a scaratiful art of Pyrgoteles and Dioscorides. There can be no doubt, however, that intaglios were common in the most remote antiquity in Egypt and China. Whether the gold seal-ring of Cheops, said to have been found some years ago, near the great pyramid, be genuine or not, it is certain that rings, bearing the images of hawk-headed or dog-headed deities, or the names of kings or cities, engraved on gold or gems, adorned the fingers of men and mummies near the times of Moses. The Bible abounds in allusions to seals, and in proofs of the reverence attached to them. Aaron's breast-plate was a mosaic of engraved piétre dure. In the Book of Job we are told that the earth in God's hand "is turned as clay to the seal," probably pointing to the brickmaker's stamp, in which the germ of the printing press is discovered in the dawn of civilisation. In the Canticles, the royal lover, mingling menaces with entreaty, conjures his beloved to wear him "as a seal upon her breast, as a seal upon her arm." The seal of Solomon was the most potent of oriental talismans. It is, perhaps, also, a tribute to its sacred character, that in eastern romance it is a standing simile for a woman's mouth, in spite of its inappropriate shape. Every reader of the "Arabian Nights" may remember that while the eyes of the Fatimas and the Azubeydahs are compared to the cyes of gazelles, their forms to the willow bough, and their cheeks to anemones, their mouths are said to resemble the signet of the son of David, or, in other words, a pair of interlaced triangles. Although public seals were unknown to the governments of antiquity, the private ones of kings and great men were frequently objects of historical notice. Pyrgoteles enjoyed the monopoly of engraving the face of Alexander the Great on gems, as Apelles and Lysippus did in painting and sculpture. After the defeat of Darius, it was noted that the conqueror sealed his letters for the Asiatic post with that monarch's head; for the mail to Europe, with his own. The capture of Jugurtha, engraved by Sylla's order on his signet, was one of the first causes which moved the jealousy of Marius. Pompey had a figure of Victory on his seal; an emerald cut with the head of Ptolemy was the favourite gem of Lucullus; a frog was the impress of the seal of Mecenas. Of Macrianus, one of the pretenders to the purple during Valerian's captivity, the most characteristic trait preserved is, that he and his children, male and female, used seals with the effigy of Alexander, thus assuming the Macedonian's head for their family crest. Seals and coins may be considered as bottles filled with memoranda and cast upon the occan of time by the earlier mariners, for the use of those who came after them. Their forts, their factories, their lighthouses, have many of them disappeared; but the bottles are perpetually being found after many days. To engraved gems we owe much of our knowledge of antique life. They have preserved for us many portraits of the great and the beautiful, giving us precious glimpses of the characters of men and the toilettes of ladies. Stamped on the faithful and time-defying onyx, we may read the hard nature, the fun and the fiddling of Nero, in his handsome face; and on the rough but kindly features of Titus, the combined gentleness and strength of his mind. There, young beauties may borrow a tint from the coiffure of the Empress Lepida, whose rich tresses, falling gracefully on her neck, are looped up behind in a circlet of pearl; and their mothers may learn

bous, when a scholiast has failed him. The use of seals appears to have been brought over the Alps by the Romans. The practice did not obtain favour among the early Franks and Saxons. The antique intaglios which fell into their hands were seldom applied to their legitimate uses, but became ornaments of the knight's dagger or goblet, the mitre of the bishop, or the chalice of the altar. Fitness of subject was but little considered in applying them; and the bindings of the gospels were sometimes encrusted with gems illustrating in a lively manner the worship of the god of gardens. Of this some instances may be found among the regalia of Charlemagne, now at Vienna. So in our own days, Captain Harris, when introduced by especial favour, and after many reverences, into the lady-chapel of the cathedral of Shoa, found the walls of that holiest of Abyssinian shrines hung round with coloured prints of the great Leicestershire steeple-chase. The earliest existing example of an English seal is, we believe, that of Edward the Confessor, appended to a charter granted by him in 1066 to the Abbey of Westminster. After the Norman conquest, seals became a necessary and important part of all deeds, and the possession of them a mark of power and dignity. For about ten centuries the use of a seal was a privilege enjoyed by none below the knightly rank. Royal seals, as is well known, bore the effigy of the king on his throne. On the seals of the laity. a man in armour and on horseback with a sword in his hand was the usual figure; and it was not till the first half of the thirteenth century that the practice became general of introducing armorial bearings upon the shield. As heraldry became an art, these insignia grew in size and importance, and at last came to stand alone. Ere Scrope and Grosvenor had gone into a court of chivalry (1385-90), which they found slow and costly in its procedure as the Court of Chancery, to try their rights to the azure field and golden bend, horse and rider had been dismissed from the seal to leave greater space for the scutcheon. As, in the captain's eye, a man-at-arms was a lance to deal thrusts, so, in the herald's, he became a mere shield to receive blazonry. The seals of the church were of that oval shape, pointed at both ends, known as the Vesica piscis. The bishop or abbot's seal bore the effigy of the patron saint of his see or abbey, and sometimes of himself standing in full canonicals and bestowing his blessing; or it was engraved with some sacred emblem handed down by tradition, or invented by himself. The design was always surrounded by a border inscribed with the owner's name and dignity. Priests of more piety than learning sometimes pressed antique signets into the service of a new creed. An abbot of Selby having become possessed of a gem with the head of an emperor, and inscribed "D. Honorius, Aug.," converted it into a seal for his own use by adding a rim of gold whereon his view of the matter was thus expressed, "Apud hoc Christus est." An archbishop of York sealed his parchments with a Roman intaglio, bearing the heads of Minerva, Socrates, and Plato, and enriched with a modern setting upon which his grace had introduced these personages to the world, in Latin of the most canine kind, as the Holy Trinity. A third churchman used for his seal a figure of Bacchus, attended by a faun with a wine cup, having first Christianised the group with the motto, "Jesus est amor meus."-London Examiner.