Judging from the various notices in your Nos. 3, 5, and 6, the dishes
and inscriptions mentioned therein by CLERICUS, L.S.B., &c., pp. 44. 73.
87., are likely to cause as much speculation here as they have some time
experienced on the continent. They were there principally figured and
discussed in the _Curiositãten_, a miscellaneous periodical, conducted
from about 1818 to 1825, by Vulpius, brother-in-law of Göthe, librarian
to the Grand Duke of Saxe Weimar. Herr v. Strombeck, Judge of the
Supreme Court of Appeal at Wolfenbüttel, first noticed them from a
specimen belonging to the church of a suppressed convent at Sterterheim
near Brunswick, and they were subsequently pounced upon by Joseph v.
Hammer (now v. Purgstall), the learned orientalist of Vienna, as one of
the principal proofs which he adduced in his _Mysterium Baphometis
Revelatum_ in one of the numbers of the _Fundgruben (Mines) des
Orients_, for the monstrous impieties and impurities which he, Nicolai,
and others, falsely attributed to the Templars. Comments upon these
dishes occur in other works of a recent period, but having left my
portfolio, concerning them, with other papers, on the continent, I give
these hasty notices entirely from memory. They are by no means uncommon
now in England, as the notices of your correspondents prove. A paper on
three varieties of them at Hull was read in 1829, to the Hull Literary
and Philosophical Society. In Nash's _Worcestershire_ one is depicted
full size, and a reduced copy given about this period in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_, and Nash first calls them "Offertory Dishes."
The Germans call them Taufbecken, or baptismal basins; but I believe the
English denomination more correct, as I have a distinct recollection of
seeing, in a Catholic convent at Danzig, a similar one placed on Good
Friday before the tomb of the interred image of the Saviour, for the
oblations for which it was not too large. Another of them is kept upon
the altar of Boroughbridge Church (N. Riding of Yorkshire), but sadly
worn down by scrubbing to keep it bright, and the attempt at a copy of
the Inscription in a Harrowgate Guide is felicitously ludicrous: it is
there taken as a relic of the Roman Isurium on the same spot. Three
others were observed some years ago in a neglected nook of the sacristy
of York Cathedral. At the last meeting of the Institute at Salisbury, a
number of these were exhibited in St. John's House there, but I believe
without any notice taken of them in its Proceedings; and another was
shown to the Archæological Society, at their last Chester Congress, by
Colonel Biddulph, at Chirk Castle; when more were mentioned by the
visitors as in their possession, anxious as your correspondents to know
the import of the inscriptions. They are sometimes seen exposed in the
shops of Wardour Street, and in other curiosity shops of the metropolis.
On their sunken centres all have religious types: the most common is the
temptation of Eve; the next in frequency, the Annunciation; the Spies
sent by Joshua returning with an immense bunch of grapes suspended
betwixt them, is not unfrequent; but non-scriptural subjects, as the
Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, mentioned by L.S.B., is a variety I have not
before observed.
The inscriptions vary, and are sometimes double in two concentral rings.
The most usual is that alluded to by your correspondents, and though
obviously German, neither old nor obsolete; having been viewed even by
native decipherers, through the mist of a preconceived hypothesis, have
never yet been by them satisfactorily accounted for. It is always
repeated four times, evidently from the same slightly curved die; when,
however, the enlarged circumference of the circle required more than
this fourfold repetition to go round it, the die was set on again for as
much of a fifth impression as was necessary: this was seldom more than
four or five letters, which, as pleonastic or intercalary, are to be
carefully rejected in reading the rest; their introduction has confused
many expositors.
The readings of some of your correspondents who understand German is
pretty near the truth. {136} I have before said that the centre type of
Eve's Temptation is the most common, and to it the words especially
refer, and seem at the place of their manufacture (most probably
Nuremburg) to have been used for other centres without any regard to its
fitness. The letters, as I can safely aver from some very perfect
specimens, are