[10]. We remember this motto for many years beneath a large figure of Time, executed in Coade and Seeley’s composition, and placed at the corner of the lane leading from Westminster Bridge Road to Pedlar’s Acre.
THE HOUR-GLASS.
The use of the Hour-glass can be traced to ancient Greece. In Christie’s Greek Vases, one is engraved from a scarabæus of sardonyx, in the Towneley collection: it is exactly like the modern hour-glass. The first mention of it occurs in a Greek tragedian named Bato. On a bas-relief of the Mattei Palace, of the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, Morpheus holds an hour-glass; and from Athenæus it appears that persons, when going out, carried it about with them, as we do a watch. In a woodcut in Hawkins’s History of Music, the frame is more solid, and the glass probably slipped in and out. There is another cut of one in Boissard, held by Death, precisely of the modern form.
The hour or sand-glass is liable to the objection, that it requires a horary attendant, as is intimated in the glee:
Five times by the taper’s light
The hour-glass we have turned to-night.
But the Hour-glass is a better measurer of time than is generally imagined. The flow of the sand from one bulb to another is perfectly equable, whatever may be the quantity of sand above the aperture. The stream flows no faster when the upper bulb is almost full than when it is almost empty; the lower heap not being influenced by the pressure of the heap above.[[11]] Bloomfield, in one of his rural tales, “The Widow to her Hour-glass,” sings:
I’ve often watched thy streaming sand,
And seen the growing mountain rise,