“The sulphur cast, from the celebrated pax of ’Maso Finiguerra, came into my hands in the following manner:--The Cavalier Seratti, in whose valuable collection it originally existed, was captured in going from Cagliari to Leghorn, and carried to Tunis, where he resided, I believe, for one or two years; but, dying in captivity, the Dey of Tunis took possession of the whole of his property. Such part of it as was not of any intrinsic value was sold to a party of Jews, who brought it over to Malta with a view of sending it to Great Britain for sale. This took place about the commencement of 1804. The property coming from Barbary was of course placed in the lazaretto. While there the plague broke out in the island, and it was a full year before the property was liberated. The Jews by this time had become apprehensive, owing to the numerous obstacles they had encountered in the realisation of their projects; and my friend the Abbate Bellanti, librarian to the Government Library, with a view to retain the collection in his native island, induced a Maltese merchant to make the Jews such an offer for the whole of the Seratti collection as they at last accepted. The merchant, however, retracted; and the abbot, after having made himself responsible for the bargain towards the Jews, found himself in an unpleasant predicament. In this dilemma he applied to me, and I readily engaged to fulfil the agreement which the merchant had forfeited. The sulphur in question formed the object of a separate bargain. I paid the value of £15 for it. I was very unfortunate in the transmission of my collection to England, two ships having been cast away in the Channel in November, 1815, both with a considerable portion of my property on board. I was more successful with the third portion, which arrived in 1816; in this was the sulphur cast. I never would have parted with it but for the above accident, whereby at that time I was much straitened in my circumstances. “The sulphur I sold to Mr. Colnaghi for £150, which I thought a low price at the time for such an interesting and unique curiosity, indispensable for illustrating and fixing the date of the invention of the art of engraving (as it is now called). This sulphur, with the print preserved at Paris, and the pax of Finiguerra himself, preserved at Florence, together with the entry in the journal of the Goldsmiths’ Company, also preserved at Florence, showing the date of the completion of the pax to be 1452, form altogether an irrefragable chain of proof which must satisfy the most sceptical. By a memorandum in Seratti’s own handwriting, which is amongst my papers (but having been sent from Bombay to Liverpool, I have not yet got), it appears that he purchased the sulphur from a painter, who bought it with a heap of other trinkets at the stall of a petty dealer in Florence: and on acquiring it Seratti compared it with the pax itself, and ascertained it to be the genuine work of Finiguerra.