INSCRIPTIONS UNKNOWN.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3132, 12 July 1881, Page 4

INSCRIPTIONS UNKNOWN.

Then there are the inscriptions on the blades. They almost constitute a literature, in poetry and in prose. For the most part they are brag and bluster; but here and there some few of them are pious, wise, or silly. The mighty glaive of Conrad Schenk of Winters'etten (4 feet 8 inches long, and 4 inches wide), which is in the Dresden Museum, hears, in antiquated German, the tenderly swaggering advice—' Conrad, dear Sehenk, remember me. Do not let Winterstetten the Brave leave one helm uncleft.' The sword of Hugues de Chateaubriand flashed in the sunlight, the noble motto won by his ancestor in the fight at Rouvines. ' Mon sang feint les bnrmieres de France.' In the Frbach Collection is an old Ferrara blade, with the suge device, ' My value varies with the hand that holds me.' A sword in the Paris Cabinet de Medailles, is reverently inscribed, ' There is no conqueror but God.' The rapiers of Toledo were engraved in hundreds with the wise counsel, *Do not draw me without reason, do not sheathe me without honor.' The invocation of saints are very frequent; and so are prayers, like, ' Do not abandon me, O faithful God,' which is on a German sword in the Az Collection at Linz ; and ejaculations, like the Arabic, 'With the help of Allah I hope to kill my enemy.' There are vaunting mottos, like the Spanish, ' When this viper stings, there is no cure in any doctor's shop;' and pompous announcements, like the Sicilian, ' I come ;' and critical observations, like the Hungarian, ' He that thinks not as I do thinks falsely ;' and the matter-of-fact declarations, like 'When I go up you go down' (only that is on an axe). This ' cutler poetry,' as - hakspere called it, presents itself all over Europe, in all languages, mixed up with the maker's address or the owner's arms. And so, if you go to Toledo now and buy a dozen blades for presentation to your friends at home, you have their names engraved upon the steel, with some sonorous Castilian phrase of friendship and gift offering.—Blackwood's Magazine.