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