Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 5).djvu/97

 sharply chiselled with a design of floral scrollwork introducing exotic birds and cornucopiae; but the blade in it appears a little heavy and may have been adapted to it. It is inscribed:.

Of Spanish fashion, but Italian workmanship, about 1640-50. Wallace Collection (Laking Catalogue, No. 583)

As may be imagined, in the national collections of Madrid, of Vienna, of Dresden, and of Paris, superb examples of these cup-hilted rapiers are to be found, together with their parrying daggers. In Madrid, for instance, certain examples are unique, both as regards the variety of their ornamentation and the absolutely perfect state of their preservation. One example, of which, unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain a photograph, not only retains its scabbard and hanger. It is blued and as fresh and brilliant in colour as a modern key-ring. Many private collections abroad and a few in England are also rich in this same type of cup-hilted rapier. Indeed, one could hardly hope to see more delicately chiselled examples than the two we select from the collection of Mr. G. H. Ramsbottom (Figs. 1489 and 1490).

It is strange that cup-hilted rapiers, Italian or Spanish, figure so seldom in the portraiture of the time; when they do appear they are all represented as of the latest type—a type we are about to enumerate—a family of the cup-hilt that it is safer to assign to a date within the last quarter of the XVIIth century rather than to the third quarter. In the more ordinary