We have met with but one case where, in a college disputation, the successful contestant was rewarded with a ring. James Crichton, who obtained the appellation of the “Admirable Crichton,” had volunteered--it was at a time when he was only twenty years of age--to dispute with any one in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, English, Dutch, Flemish and Sclavonian; and this, either in verse or prose. He did not seem to prepare himself, but occupied his time in hunting, hawking, tilting, vaulting, tossing a pike, handling a musket and other military feats. Crichton duly appeared in the College of Navarre and acquitted himself beyond expression in the disputation, which lasted from nine o’clock in the morning until six at night. At length, the President, after extolling him highly for the many rare and excellent endowments which God and nature had bestowed upon him, rose from his chair and, accompanied by four of the most eminent professors of the University, gave him a diamond ring (with a purse full of money) as a testimony of regard and favor.[299] In England, during the year 1815, a tooth of Sir Isaac Newton was sold for seven hundred and twenty pounds to a nobleman who had it set in a ring. The elder Kean used to wear, to the hour of his death, a gold snake ring, with ruby head and emerald eyes. At the sale of his effects, it fetched four guineas and an half.[300] On the day of the arrival of Miss Milbankes’ answer to Lord Byron’s offer of marriage, he was sitting at dinner in Newstead Abbey, when his gardener came and presented him with his mother’s ring, which she had lost and which the gardener had just found in digging up the mould under her window. Almost at the same moment, the letter from Miss Milbankes arrived; and Lord Byron exclaimed, “If it contains a consent, I will be married with this very ring.”[301] It does not appear whether it was really used. Strange, if it were! and singular that his lordship, so full of powerful superstition, should have suggested it. His mother’s temper had been, in part, his bane; her marriage was a most unhappy one; the poet’s father notoriously wedded for money and was separated from his wife--while, the poet’s offer, at a time when he was greatly embarrassed, coupled with his own mysterious after-separation, would make this ring appear a fatal talisman if it were really placed upon Miss Milbankes’ finger. It was in his after-bitterness, in his desolate state and dissoluteness that Byron called the wedding-ring “the damn’dest part of matrimony.” § 5. In the last Polish struggle, the matrons of Warsaw sent their marriage rings to coin into ducats.[302]