They are made of brass, each of them of eleven and a-half inches in height. They are of French manufacture; the sunk parts are filled up with an inlay of blue, green, and white enamel, very similar to that done at Limoge. These extremely elegant and curious articles are the property of Lord Holland, and are preserved at Holland House, Kensington.
Holland House is associated "with the costly magnificence of Rich, with the loves of Ormond, the councils of Cromwell, and the death of Addison." It has been for nearly two centuries and a-half the favourite resort of wits and beauties, of painters and poets, of scholars, philosophers, and statesmen. In the lifetime of the late Lord Holland, it was the meeting-place of "the Whig Party;" and his liberal hospitality made it "the resort, not only of the most interesting persons composing English society—literary, philosophical, and political, but also to all belonging to those classes who ever visited this country from abroad."
EXTRAORDINARY INSTANCES OF INHUMANITY.
In 1534, in the wars of Edward III. with France, Fordun relates that a Frenchman purchased from the Scots several English prisoners, and that he beheaded them to avenge the death of his father. This sentimental cruelty can perhaps be paralleled by that of Coccinas, who, at the massacre of Paris, bought many Huguenots, that he might torture them to death for his private satisfaction. Philip Galeas Visconti, Duke of Milan, was a man of a nature so timid, that thunder threw him into agonies; yet was he so inhuman, that he could enjoy the shrieks of a female stretched upon a rack. Wenceslaus, the German Emperor, say Mezeray, Voltaire, and others, roasted his cook alive, for dressing his dinner amiss; and never had so intimate a friend in Prague as the common executioner; and even him he put to death at last, for not taking him at his word, when he once had bid him cut his head off, and actually knelt down to receive the stroke.
ANCIENT ROMAN LAMPS.
The earliest lamps fabricated by the potters of ancient Rome have an open circular body, with a curved projecting rim to prevent the oil from spilling, and occur both in terra-cotta, and also in the black glazed ware found in the sepulchres of Nola. Many have a projecting hollow pipe in the centre, in order to fix them to a stick on the top of a candelabrum. These lamps have no handles. They may have been placed in the sacella or lararia, and were turned on the potter's wheel.
The shoe-shaped is the most usual, with a round body, a projecting spout or nozzle having a hole for the wick, and a small annular handle, which is more or less raised.
A singular variety of lamp, well adapted for a table, was fitted into a kind of small altar, the sides of which were ornamented with reliefs. Several however, from their unusual shape, maybe considered as fancy ware, the upper part, or the whole lamp, being moulded into the resemblance of some object. Such are lamps in the British Museum in the shape of a female head surmounted by a flower, or of the head of a negro or Nubian with open jaws, through which the wick was inserted.