“Che male aggiusto ’l conio di Vinegia,”
is represented by Dante as worthy of an especial notice among those sinners against laws divine and moral with whom he has peopled the shades of his Inferno.
Seriously, however, we think that any clever work of art is worthy of being preserved, and none the less for its having taken in some who set themselves up as judges. Even in Pliny’s time a counterfeit denarius of superior workmanship was sometimes thought cheap at the price of sundry genuine denarii. The tasteful device of Cellini, or of some cunning artist of Padua, must not be thrown to the dogs, merely because it was produced with the intention of rivalling the work of ancient artists, and of testing the acumen of the cognoscenti. Those figures of Cellini, for instance, which some one brought and exhibited to the artist himself as antiques, and respecting which the nobleman who was their proprietor declared, when he saw a smile playing upon the conscious visage of Cellini, that there had not lived a man for these thousand years who could have wrought such;—would not those figures have been worth preserving? And in like manner a coin which, by the excellence of its workmanship, has raised a doubt whether it may not have been really of ancient origin, ought by no means to be treated with contempt, even though it proves to be modern.
The learned work of Colonel Leake, now before us, has supplied a desideratum in the archæological literature of our country. It is the first work of the kind upon Greek coins which has been published by an Englishman, and those of our readers who are acquainted with his character will agree that no Englishman could have been found to do it so well as Colonel Leake. The vast amount of knowledge which he has been laying up for more than half a century, in regard to the literature, the mythology, the political and social history, and the geography of ancient Greece, supplies an infinity of streams which flow over the pages of his work in the form of notes. No longer shall we blush under the well-grounded reproach that all the standard works upon Greek coinage are written by foreigners. Already, indeed, we observe that Professor L. Müller, in his Numismatique d’Alexandre, just published at Copenhagen, has made ample use of Colonel Leake’s volume, which must necessarily become a text-book in this branch of Greek archæology. For the convenience of those who may consult it, not only is every ordinary variety of index supplied to the coins themselves, but we observe that, in an appendix, an index is added to the valuable information contained in the notes. We observe, also, in the appendix, a very interesting and learned dissertation upon the weights of Greek coins, in which Colonel Leake traces the Attic didrachmon—which seems to have been a sort of standard or unit in the monetary scales of Persia and Lydia, as well as of the cities and colonies of Greece—to Phœnicia, and from Phœnicia to Egypt. It would scarcely be in accordance with our usual practice to enter into the more erudite part of this important subject, and we shall therefore conclude our remarks by making one reference to the work, in order to show how successful its author has been in availing himself of the light which a coin may throw upon the more obscure portions of ancient geography.
In Colonel Leake’s collection there is a coin, recently brought to light, of a people called the Orthians, bearing the Thessalian type of a horse issuing from a rocky cavern, in allusion to the story that Neptune produced the horse originally by a stroke of his trident upon a Thessalian rock. Now a city, called “Orthe,” is mentioned by Homer in the second book of the Iliad.[[11]] With regard to the site of this city, there was a difference of opinion among geographers even in Strabo’s time; the majority seem to have identified it with the acropolis of a more modern city, which at that time was known by the name of Phalanna. But inasmuch as there are coins now extant of Phalanna, and of a date contemporaneous with that of Colonel Leake’s coin of Orthe, it is evident that Phalanna and Orthe were two separate and distinct places. The appearance, therefore, of this previously unknown coin of Orthe corrects an error which prevailed among geographers as far back as the time of Strabo. It shows that Phalanna and Orthe were not the same place. Out of the five cities mentioned by Homer in this passage, Strabo had well ascertained the position of three; and Colonel Leake is now enabled to fix the probable position of the fourth. In reference to such facts as this, Colonel Leake observes in his preface that they have an important bearing upon the great question as to the origin of the Homeric poems.
“It seems impossible,” he says, “for any impartial reader of the Iliad, who is not seeking for arguments in favour of a preconceived theory; who visits the scene of the poem; and who, when making himself acquainted with the Dramatis Personæ in the second book, identifies the sites of their cities, and thus finds the accuracy of Homer confirmed by existing evidence,—to believe that no such city as Troy ever existed, and that the Trojan war is a mere poetic invention; this, too, in defiance of the traditions of all antiquity, and the belief of intelligent historians, who lived more than two thousand years nearer the event than ourselves. The Iliad differs not from any other poetical history or historical romance, unless it be in the great length of time which appears to have elapsed between the events and the poem; but which time was employed by an intelligent people in improving and perfecting their language and poetry—in committing, by the latter, past occurrences to memory; and the principal subjects of which, therefore, could not have been any other than religious and historical.”
The study of coins has been very much facilitated by recent improvements in the art of electrotype, which now enables the collector to obtain perfect copies of the rarer and more costly specimens, and to render them as useful to art and literature as the originals themselves. For purposes of reference we have a noble collection in the National Museum, as well as another which, although of much more limited extent, is nearer to ourselves, and therefore more accessible to students on this side of the Tweed, at Glasgow. In the concluding paragraph of his preface, Colonel Leake mentions these two collections in connection with each other; and with that paragraph we shall also conclude our remarks upon his valuable work.
“Augmented as our National Collection has been by the bequest of Mr Payne Knight, by the purchase of the Bargon Collection, and by similar acquisitions on the dispersion of the Devonshire, Thomas, and Pembroke cabinets, it now rivals most of those on the Continent. With the addition of the Hunterian at Glasgow, which the Trustees of the British Museum have now, at the end of eighty or ninety years, once more the opportunity of acquiring, with the assistance of Government, it would be the richest in Europe.”
TICKLER AMONG THE THIEVES!
EXTRACT FROM AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, WITH A PREFATORY NOTICE.
Poor Tickler! The thing happened in this wise.—But, by the way, before coming to that, it may not be amiss to give the reader some idea who Tickler is:—to wit, a very Skye of Skyes, with a mouth the roof whereof is dark as midnight: his glittering eyes are black as jet; his ears short, his legs none of the longest, but his body is: his tail is a triumph, when fairly spread out; and as for the strength with which it is attached to his body, you may hold him up by the aforesaid tail as long as you can—with one hand. Then his hair is pepper-and-salt in hue, long and curly, and—if I may so speak (though no one but myself and the family will know exactly what I mean by it)—with a kind of silken wiriness. And as for cleanliness, why, he is washed thoroughly every Friday morning, and carefully combed afterwards; and the recurring day of that jobation (to use a word of his own) he is as perfectly acquainted with as the gentleman who performs the operation, and has come, in process of time, even to like the thing: witness how he jumps into the tub of warm water of his own accord, alike in winter and summer, with a kind of alacrity. He makes no fuss about it, except that sometimes, when the soapy water gets into his eyes, they wink at you in silent suffering, which he unconsciously aggravates, instead of alleviating, by putting up his wet paw to rub them! Through this operation he has gone for now nearly twelve years, and a sweeter dog there is not than Tickler. I may indeed almost say as much in respect of his temper, which is excellent whenever he has everything his own way. I have reflected a good deal on the dog’s idiosyncrasy, and think I now know it well. ’Tis tinctured by a warm regard for himself, with respect to the good things of this life; he says, reasonably enough, that if there are good things to be had, he cannot think why he should not try to get them, and like them, since he is formed for the purpose, if he can get them; and as for huge or little hungry dogs in the street, of the plebeian order, he does not dislike to see them enjoying themselves, by way of giving a zest, as it were, to starvation,—if he have no fancy himself for what they have routed out of the gutter. He says he thinks they must often be sore driven; for he has sometimes seen a gaunt dog crunching a dirty bone till he has actually almost eaten it! I am sure Tickler is not without feeling; for one day he was sitting on a chair, with his paws resting on the top of it, near the window, in a warm dining-room, on a blighting day in February—the dust-laden wind without seeming to cut both man and beast to the very bone: and at the foot of our steps there had presumed to sit a dirty half-starved cur, shivering miserably in every muscle, but uttering no sound—neither whine nor bark.