richly engraved, and adorned with bass-reliefs and statuettes, and brilliant with many-colored enamel and with jewels--the reliquaries in which were kept the innumerable holy relics that then filled Europe, the famous shrines for the bodies of the saints, about which pilgrims from every quarter were ever at prayer, and the tombs of the Crusaders, and of dignitaries of Church or State. They employed their skill, too, for the lesser glory of the churches, upon the vessels of the Holy Communion, the crosses, candelabra, and censers, and the ornaments that incrusted the vestments of the priests. With the increase of luxury and wealth they found a new field for their invention in contributing to the magnificence of secular life; in fashioning into strange forms the ewers, goblets, flagons, and every vessel which adorned the banquet; and in ornamenting them with fantastic figures, or with scenes from the chase, or from the history of Charlemagne and Saladin, as well as in executing those finely wrought decorations with which the silks and velvets of the nobles were so heavily charged that the old poet, Martial d’Auvergne, says the lords and knights were “caparisoned in gold-work and jewels.” Under Charles V. of France (1364) and the great Dukes of the Low Countries, the jewel-chamber of the prince was his pride in peace and his treasury in war: it furnished gifts for the bride, the favorite, and the heir, and for foreign ambassadors and princes; it afforded pay for retainers before the battle and ransom after it, and in the days of the great fêtes its treasures gave to the courts of France, Burgundy, and Flanders a magnificence that has seldom been seen in Europe.[5]