With this, again, like a second
reflexion of that inward similitude, is connected the conceit of two
marvellously beautiful cups, also exactly like each other--children's
cups, of wood, but adorned with gold and precious stones. These two
cups, which by their resemblance help to bring the friends together at
critical moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he baptized them
at Rome, whither the parents had taken them for that purpose, in
thankfulness for their birth, and cross and recross in the narrative,
serving the two heroes almost like living things, and with that
well-known effect of a beautiful object kept constantly before the eye
in a story or poem, of keeping sensation well awake, and giving a
certain air of refinement to all the scenes into which it enters; with a
heightening also of that sense of fate, which hangs so much of the
shaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello's strawberry
handkerchief; and witnessing to the enjoyment of beautiful handiwork by
primitive people, almost dazzled by it, so that they give it an oddly
significant place among the factors of a human history.
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