There are also many inexplicable subjects, portraying groups of three four, five, and six figures, evidently intended to commemorate events in history; also mythological processions, both in rude intaglios and equally mediocre cameos, giving triumphs of Silenus and Bacchus, portraying these heroes in forms, the drawing of which would raise blushes on their cheeks could they return to earth and be allowed to criticise their effigies. Silenus, even full of wine, would have growled and remonstrated, and would have pronounced some of them absurd misrepresentations; they, however, are very interesting, if only on account of their contrast with the examples of Greek and Roman glyptic art. [Illustration] In this epoch, again, we find instances of the sensitiveness of the numismatic branch of the art of gem-engraving, for the models of all pieces of money are intaglios, and thus far they are related to the glyptic art; and it has always been the first industry giving evidence of a decline. The view of these relics of cloister art convinces us that they of the dark ages did not contribute the truly beautiful.... Yet shadows pass “with time and the hour.”... Night is passing, ... comes the gray, ... comes the dawn, ... comes the morning light. Creatures that at evening ceased their song, tune now their pipes and sing again; they chant anon the requiem of the Night of Art; and yet anon, they sing the coming of the light. They celebrate at last, with hope, the renewing of all things beautiful in art. The orb of day gilds the horizon; man beholds the aurora of approaching day. RENAISSANCE. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, under the encouragement of the Medici family, skilled artisans again emigrated to Italy as coadjutors in the great revival of all that was beautiful in gem-engraving. They created, for the glyptic phase of art, a position almost as important as it had enjoyed in the first century A. D. It is not surprising that comparatively so few engraved gems have been handed down to us when we consider the tides of the last twenty centuries as a great sea which has borne to the shores of civilized Europe, and later to America, specimens of ancient art creations--that sea, at times placid, yet ever and anon turbulent with devastating storms, whose iconoclastic waves broke upon the ancient sites of antiquity, destroying treasures that thus have been irreparably lost to archæological science and to our museums. As a child becomes restless with the consciousness of coming day before it fully wakes from sleep, man, weary of this night of ignorance and the atmosphere of barbarism--fretful on his couch under the yoke of tyranny, striving to shake it off while yet enveloped by the shades of error, rose up to seek an element he knew not, a light he dreamed would come! SOMMERVILLE COLLECTION. [Illustration: 624] [Illustration: 601] [Illustration: 634] [Illustration: 1358] [Illustration: 632] [Illustration: 621] [Illustration: 631]