Then said Arnada, that sweete thing “Have here of me a gold ring With a precyous stone; Where-soe you bee on water or Land And this ring upon your hand Nothing may you slone.”[511] Sometimes the virtues of the ring are conceived in a poetic spirit and are associated intimately with the giver, as we find in the romance of Ywaine and Gawin. Here the stone set in the ring given by Ywaine protects the wearer from imprisonment, illness, loss of blood, and danger in battle, but the lady tells her lover that this virtue exists in the ring “while you it have and think on me,” that is, only so long as his love endures.[512] That the magic virtues of the images and talismans were liable to wane and pass away, was taught by Albertus Magnus, who likened these powers to those of animate objects which were also transitory. When the period fixed by heaven had come to an end, the power of the image would be broken and it would be useless, cold and dead. This, in his opinion, accounted for the fact that many talismanic figures failed to display any efficacy, although they had done so in ancient times.[513] In the “Book of Thetel,” as quoted by Konrad von Megenberg,[514] one of the engraved gems is described as follows: A man seated upon a footstool, crowned, and stretching forth his hands to the heavens. Beneath him are four men appearing to support the stool. Take mastic and terebinth (turpentine) and put them under the stone in a silver finger-ring, having twelve times the weight of the stone in the ring. If this be placed beneath the head of a sleeping person, he dreams of what he longed for when awake. The curious statement that the metal ring was to weigh twelve times as much as the stone, seems to indicate an influence of the superstition in regard to the number twelve. The Londesborough Collection contains a ring which represents a toad swallowing a serpent. This was evidently used as an amulet and the design seems to have some connection with the curious superstition that a serpent, to become a dragon, must swallow a serpent. A Greek proverb, found in Suidas (ab. the tenth century A.D.), is aptly rendered by Dryden (Edipus, Act III, sc. 1) as follows: A serpent ne’er becomes a flying dragon till he has eat a serpent. Hence this ring combined the curative or talismanic powers attributed to the toad, the serpent and the dragon.[515]