Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/384

354 as I can in retrograde chronological order, though keeping each country together and beginning with the north of Europe.

In the Museum of Nymwegen, in Holland, there is a much damaged life-size mask in terra-cotta, and another of a child. No details are given, but it seems quite certain they were found in a Roman cemetery of the upper class, lying at the foot of the Hunerberg. An iron mask plated with bronze was found at Cologne in 1841. It is evidently a portrait. Holes are cut through the metal to give the outline of the eyes and to indicate the nostrils, and it seems as if there had been a slit to show the opening of the lips.

From Germany we now pass to France, where four or five masks have been unearthed. In the Museum of the Louvre there are preserved two silver masks from a hoard found at Nôtre Dame d'Alençon, near Brissac (Maine et Loire). There is some doubt, however, whether they are sepulchral or not, for they were not found in a tomb. One of them is believed by Herr Benndorf to represent a male face with well-developed wrinkles on the forehead and with strongly marked eyebrows. The apertures for the eyes are cut out. In the hair just above the forehead is a bezel to receive a large stone or jewel, and three smaller bezels at the base of the neck. Round the edge of the mask there are six small holes of attachment. M. Toussaint-Grille d'Angers, however, was of opinion that this was the mask of a woman larger than life, and that the holes were for attaching it to a statue, probably of a goddess. M. de Longpérier took it to be a mask of Minerva, intended to be fixed to a statue of wood or bronze. The other mask is that of a woman with the corners of the mouth drawn down; and some effort has been made to produce a portrait. In this instance the pupils only are pierced; and there is no trace in either mask that the aperture for the eye had ever been filled with a vitreous paste or with any other substance. Both the French archæologists were of opinion