Seven Nelson memorial rings were shown at the Royal Naval Exhibition at Chelsea in 1891; two of these contained some of the hero’s hair, and one belonged to those distributed among Nelson’s captains and other officers after his death. Of the two rings enclosing hair, one set with a diamond was loaned by Messrs. Lambert & Co. and the other by Admiral Sir Arthur Farquhar, K.C.B.[78] A fine specimen of a Nelson ring is in the British Museum. The broad, flat hoop expands at the shoulders, and in a raised oblong bezel are figured a viscount’s coronet and a ducal coronet with N beneath the former and B beneath the latter, indicating his titles Viscount Nelson of the Nile and Duke of Bronté. Below the letters is the name Trafalgar and on the exterior of the hoop appears Nelson’s motto “_Palmam qui meruit ferat_” (Let him bear the palm who merits it). There is historic record of two memorial rings, one set with an emerald and the other with a sapphire, the gifts of two unhappy royal personages made shortly before death. The first of these rings was bestowed upon the great French preacher Bossuet by the Stuart princess Henrietta Anne, who, on her death-bed, directed that after she had gone to rest there should be given to Bossuet “the emerald ring she had ordered to be made for him.” Of the second ring, that set with a sapphire, we learn that shortly before her execution in 1587, the unfortunate Mary of Scotland took it from her finger and sent it to her faithful follower, Lord John Hamilton, in whose family it has since then been passed down from generation to generation as a priceless heirloom.[79] Several memorial or mourning rings are among the treasures of the Figdor Collection in Vienna. One of these is of massive silver and has the Old French inscription: “_dort couat_,” (rest in peace); it was found at Huy, near Statte, Belgium, and represents work of the fifteenth century. Another is of enamelled gold, and is evidently for a woman’s wear. The inscription is: “R. C. Not lost but gone before,” in gilt letters on a white enamel ground. This is an English ring of about 1800. A German ring of the eighteenth century has its head formed in the shape of a coffin, on which are skull and cross-bones; on its sides is the inscription: “Hir ist Ruhe,” (Here is rest). When the lid is lifted, a heart is disclosed in the coffin.[80] _Memento mori_ rings, bearing a death’s head, were sometimes left as legacies. Such was the “golde ringe with a deathe’s head” bequeathed by Thomasin Heath to her sister in 1596, “for a remembrance of my good will.” Shakespeare wrote in his Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act V, sc. 2) of “a Death’s face in a ring,” where poor, pedantic Holofernes’ countenance is made the subject of mockery. A rather unaccountable circumstance is that such rings are asserted to have been worn, toward the end of the sixteenth century, by professional “ladies light o’ love,” if we can safely generalize from a passage in Marston’s “Dutch Courtezan.”[81]