To go back to the fourteenth century: there is a fine touch of human nature recorded of one member of the goldsmiths’ guild of London who was found guilty of mals outrages in connexion with his work. He was fined a pipe of wine, and twelve pence a week for one year to a poor member of the company.

Among the human touches left there are fragments recorded which are interesting to collectors. Sir Thomas Gresham, the great London goldsmith in the middle sixteenth century, carried on business in Lombard Street at the sign of the Grasshopper. To this day there is a grasshopper as a weathercock behind the Royal Exchange.

There is Sir Robert Vyner, who made the coronation crown jewels for Charles II, afterwards stolen by Colonel Blood and scattered in the Minories, who was a goldsmith of Lombard Street. He entertained Charles II during his mayorality. Sir Robert, when he had well drunken, grew very familiar with the king, who wished to steal away without ceremony and proceed to his coach. But the mayor pursued him to Guildhall yard, and catching hold of him exclaimed with an oath, “Sir, you shall stay and take t’ other bottle,” and the Merry Monarch, true to his name, with a smile hummed the line of the old song:

“He that is drunk is as great as a king,”

and turned back to finish the bottle. We like this story. A piece of plate with Sir Robert Vyner’s initials of the year 1675 would possess added value for this touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.

On the look-out for links connecting the silversmith with things human we find an interesting shop card of Ellis Gamble, to whom by his own desire young Hogarth was apprenticed and learned to engrave on silver plate. It may be imagined that he was not an “Idle Apprentice,” and his early work with the graver on the flagons and tankards in Mr. Gamble’s shop should stimulate research. It was here that he drew heraldic beasts. His apprenticeship terminated when he was twenty years of age. There is preserved in Hogarth Illustrated (by Ireland) the engraving of the Kendal Arms during his apprenticeship, showing fine design.

We give the inscription on Ellis Gamble’s shop card, which is in a frame, termed by bookplate collectors “Chippendale.” There is a full-length figure of a winged angel standing on a scroll, and the lettering is somewhat crowded below in English and in French:—

“Ellis Gamble, Goldsmith at the Golden Angel in Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, Makes Buys and Sells all sorts of Plate, Rings and Jewells, etc.”

An interesting sidelight on makers’ names is afforded by the various copper tokens which they struck, bearing their names and addresses. We append a short list of goldsmiths’ tokens of the seventeenth century. They come from various parts of the country and from Ireland, and readers having seventeenth century silver bearing these initials may be able to identify the maker.