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A memorial of Nelson is left in some half-dozen of rings. In the place of a stone, each ring has a metal basso relievo representation of Nelson, half bust. The metal, blackish in appearance, forming the relief, being, in reality, portions of the ball which gave the Admiral his fatal wound at Trafalgar.
Cardinal York, the last of the Stuart family, left as a legacy to the Prince of Wales, afterwards George the Fourth, a valuable ring which was worn by the kings of Scotland on the day of their coronation.
In England, during the year 1815, a tooth of Sir Isaac Newton was sold for seven hundred and twenty pounds to a nobleman who had it set in a ring.
The elder Kean used to wear, to the hour of his death, a gold snake ring, with ruby head and emerald eyes. At the sale of his effects, it fetched four guineas and an half.
On the day of the arrival of Miss Milbankes' answer to Lord Byron's offer of marriage, he was sitting at dinner in Newstead Abbey, when his gardener came and presented him with his mother's ring, which she had lost and which the gardener had just found in digging up the mould under her window. Almost at the same moment, the letter from Miss Milbankes arrived; and Lord Byron exclaimed, "If it contains a consent, I will be married with this very ring." It does not appear whether it was really used. Strange, if it were! and singular that his lordship, so full of powerful superstition, should have suggested it. His mother's temper had been, in part, his bane; her marriage was a most unhappy one; the poet's father notoriously wedded for money and was separated from his wife-while, the poet's offer, at a time when he was greatly embarrassed, coupled with his own mysterious after-separation, would make this ring appear a fatal talisman if it were really placed upon Miss Milbankes' finger. It was in his after bitterness, in his desolate state and dissoluteness that Byron called the wedding-ring "the damn'dest part of matrimony." |
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Jewelry Guide Vol 1
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