depart forlorn.
The diction of alliterative poetry has fallen out of use, and consequently this illustration must labour under the disadvantage of being in a form unfamiliar to the general reader. Nevertheless, with a little attention, the essential point will become plain. The royal translator had been refreshed and invigorated with the lucid stream of Gregory’s discourse, and at the moment of parting with a beloved task he sought to relieve his full-fraught soul with a grateful burst of eulogy. Out of all the topics that were appropriate to the occasion he chose the perennial water of life promised at the well of Samaria, and upon this noble theme he expatiated with a fertility of invention which makes it the easier for us to attribute to him the rich symbolism of the Alfred Jewel.
And now to gather up the results of this chapter. We have found more than one reason to think that our Enamel was an insular, and not a continental product. This conclusion was reached by two different paths, first when we were tracing the technical history of the fabrication, and again when we were seeking the spiritual meaning of the design; by these two widely different lines of evidence we were led severally and independently to infer a British rather than a foreign origin for the Figure[29].
This inference was further confirmed by a third evidential process, arising out of the sympathy of meaning which appears to unite the enamelled Figure with the engraved device upon its back-plate. This led us to question the long-established doctrine of duality of origin which rested upon the authority of Sir Francis Palgrave, and to infer that the whole composition of the Jewel had been projected and devised by a single mind.
Finally, we found reason to think that all these features harmonized well with the mind and character of a person with whose name the Jewel is already connected by the Epigraph; and if anything was yet wanting to complete the identification of that person, it seems to be supplied by certain traces of inward affinity between the symbolism of the Jewel and that of the epilogue to the translation of the Pastoral Care, one of the surest monuments of the mind of king Alfred.
[16] For the etymology: enamel is a compound of the simple amel, which is now obsolete. This was an anglicized form of French émail, which in Old French was esmal, whose cognates were Provençal esmalt, Spanish and Portuguese esmalte, Italian smalto (used by Dante), which, in medieval Latin, was smaltum. The source is Old High German *smaltjan, our verb to smelt, i.e. to fuse by heat (New English Dictionary, v. Amel).
[17] It is figured in the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, v. Crown.
[18] These eight plates have been reproduced by M. de Linas in his Histoire du Travail à l’Exposition universelle de 1867, p. 125.