gems, glyptic, engraved gems, agate, cameo, intaglio, shell, ancient gems, Rome, Greece, ancient jewelry, rings

A bronze statuette has lately been brought to London, and offered for sale to the Trustees of the British Museum, which, both from its own extraordinary merit as a work of art, and the singular circumstances of its concealment and discovery, may be considered the most important specimen of the kind with which the National Collection has ever had the chance of being enriched. For its description I cannot do better than quote the words of an accomplished critic writing in the Pall Mall Gazette, who, after mentioning the want of any single specimen in the Bronze Room to image forth the beauty of actual manhood, thus continues:—“A bronze statuette has lately been submitted to the Trustees of the British Museum, in which this type of evenly-developed manhood is kept, and perfected. The figure is nearly 24 in. in height, and would seem to have been designed as the figure of an athlete. Critical authority has assigned the work to the best period of Greek art in bronze; and from the dignity of treatment, wherein we find combined the two noblest artistic qualities of possible energy and actual repose, not less than in the beauty and stability of the workmanship, there is enough to warrant this judgment.”