the actual ceremony, being merely one of the sponsalia, gifts made to many persons at the time of entering into a solemn engagement as a testimony of the contract. It may be remarked that, among the Romans, a ring was frequently handed over by way of earnest at the closing of a bargain. One of the most singular marriage-contracts in which the ring was introduced was that annual alliance of the city of Venice to the sea, which dated from the year 1176. On Ascension Day in every year the Doge sailed in his splendid galley—the Bucentaur—into the Adriatic amongst the palaces that had their origin in dirt and seaweed, and let a ring fall into the water, whilst he pronounced the words “Desponsamus te, Mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii.” Alas! the presumption of man that dares to speak of the lastingness of aught belonging to him, most of all when the possession he boasts of is dominion!
Connected with this ceremony we may refer to the fresco-painting executed by the Bellini for the Hall of Council in the Doge’s palace, in one of which the Doge Grimani was represented in the act of receiving from the Pope the gold ring to be used in his espousal of the Adriatic. We may recall this picture the more appropriately since, like the observance it was designed to commemorate, it is transferred into the list of things that were: it was destroyed by fire in 1577.
It is a flat truism to say that of all earthly things, fortune excepted, fashion has had the widest reign, and taken to herself the greatest privilege of fickleness. Could it be expected that the ring would escape her influence? Not only have rings been worn on fingers of the hand, but on the wrists, arms and ankles, in the nose and ears; not only have they been made of metal, but of glass, stone, wood, ivory; and, in short, of every substance which can be shaped into the annular form. Rings in the nose were once worn by the Israelitish women, but are now confined to savages and pigs. We have been more reconciled to the sight of rings in the ears of men (it is a common custom amongst the lower classes on the continent to wear them thus) since we learned that our own Shakspeare adopted the fashion; at least if the accuracy of the portrait once belonging to Lord Ellesmere may be trusted. At all events this mode of wearing rings was common amongst the gallants of Shakspeare’s day. When Master Matthew (Every Man in his Humour, 1596) was in straits for money, he offered to pawn the jewel in his ear. The thumb at some periods has been adorned with a ring. We think there is a story of a Roman lady who was wont to slip one of her husband’s rings upon her wrist and wear it as a bracelet.
In the early part of the last century it is stated in the British Apollo, to have been the custom to place the ring in the ceremony of marriage upon the fourth finger, but afterwards to wear it on the thumb.
“Multis hoc modis, ut cætera omnia, luxuria variavit, gemmas addendo exquisiti fulgoris, censuque opimo digitos onerando sicut dicemus in gemmarum volumine, mox et effigies varias cælando, ut alibi ars, alibi sententia esset in pretio.” Such is the elegant language of Pliny, and he proceeds to detail some of the modes of wearing that, the various shapes of which he had summarily alluded to. The Gauls and Britons, he says, placed the ornament on the middle finger, whereas, in his day at Rome, that was the only finger on which it was not carried. In the seventeenth century a fashion prevailed in England of having a skull cut on the stone, a mode dictated by the same feeling, one would think, that induces a tobacco-smoker to have the bowl of his hookah carved in the shape of a grinning caput mortuum. Among the whimsical figures to which the countenance of the pedant Holofernes is likened by the merry lords in “Love’s Labour Lost,” is a death’s face in a ring. He is going to deliver a grave speech in an assumed character before the Princess and her court, and being repeatedly interrupted, he declares he will not be put out of countenance by them. Because, says Biron, thou hast no face. What is this? replies the unlucky schoolmaster, pointing to that part of his person which answered to the visage of other people, and immediately a bushel of derisive similitudes was showered upon him.
Young, in a passage, condemning the frivolous pursuits of life in the presence of its awful realities, represents man as attired—
In all the fruitless fopperies of life,
And raffling for the Death’s head on the ring.
Many (said Robinson, Bishop of Bangor, in one of his sermons) carry death on their fingers when he is never nigh their hearts. A ring made of two entwined, and hence called gimmal ring (gemellus, a twin), was at one time in use, as we are reminded by a passage here and there in our old plays. Thus, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Beggar’s Bush”—
Hub. Sure I should know that gimmal.
Jac. ’Tis certain he—I had forgot my ring, too.
There is an allusion now and then occurring amongst the writers of that period which we do not altogether understand. When a damsel was crossed in love we find her straightway employed in making rings of rushes. The tailor’s daughter, in the “Two Noble Kinsmen,” is an instance; and again we are told that Phædria, whilst in her boat busy with “vaine toyes,” devised some “gaudy girlonds” and “rings of rushes.”—(Faery Queen, Book ii, 77.) The usage no longer obtains with us of engraving an inscription on the ring, but formerly it was not complete unless it had its posy, a word which was probably derived from ποίησις, a poetical maxim. Old Udal spells it poysee, which brings it very near the Greek word.
The composition of an apt motto was deemed no dishonourable task by the great wits of a by-gone age, and their pens seemed to have been guided by a rule something like that given by Sir Toby to his friend Sir Andrew for the composition of his challenge. “Be brief; it is no matter how witty, so it be eloquent and full of invention.” When Jacques and Orlando met in the forest—neither of them in the humour for wordy politeness—such was the epigrammatic pithiness of