Scaling a Coin.
"Ci vuo il genio,"—he was right; and think you 'tis so easy or simple a thing to clean a coin? to unmask an empress, pertinacious in her disguise, or to scrape acquaintance with emperors? Try it;—not that you will succeed; but that the difficulties which you are thus made to encounter in the attempt, will dispose you the more readily to do justice to the skill of those who succeed in this delicate process, which, like the finer operations of surgery, requires at once precision and address, great nicety in the handling of your instrument; while the importance attached to the operation itself makes the successful performance of it not a little desirable. The penknife, guided by a dexterous hand, may light upon a discovery that has been buried for ages; and a pin's point may make revelations sufficient to adjust some obscure point in history. Who knows what face may now lie hid (facies dicatur an ulcus?) under some obscure coating of paste? What an it be a Vitellius; what if a Pertinax should reveal himself? or suppose, when you have removed the foul larvæ, you undermine a Matidia! a Plotina!! an Annia Faustina!!! and your fortune is made! 'Tis a lottery, we admit. But the very principle of the excitement—the charm is, that you know not what may turn up; for a less chance, you may possibly have bought a "Terno" in a Frankfort lottery, the chance of an estate on the Moselle! But there are small prizes to be picked up occasionally—and here's a case in point:—"I was one day sauntering," said our friend C——, "by the tomb of Cecilia Metella, when a peasant came up with a handful of very dirty-looking coins, so firmly encrusted with mortar, that it seemed absurd to attempt its removal. Having nothing particular to do, and liking the wild quiet of the spot, I gave some 'baiocchi' to the man; and taking my seat on a bit of the old aqueduct, I opened my penknife, and began to scrape away. At first I saw the trace of a letter; and digging round it, I at length disinterred a large M——a Roman M! It was probably Maximin, or his son Maximus, that I then had under my thumb; but it might be a Marinus, in which case it was a valuable coin; so I wrought on with renewed vigour, and presently an L was in the field. A better prospect this than the last; for if it turned out to be an Æmilianus, I should have made a good morning's work of it—and it was so! Little by little, line by line, grain by grain, I opened the field, till C. Julius Æmilianus, Pontif: Max: in a full epigraphe, shone forth with the imperial head in full relief, all in a bright emerald patina. I have seen several Æmilianuses, but none like that; and it cost me only a penny."
Now, touching the difficulties in your way—should you still fancy them to be imaginary—take any dirty coin nigra moneta sordibus, and try to clean it; oil it, and scrub it as you may; pick into, poke at, finally, waste your whole morning over it, till your back aches, and your penknife is blunted; you will have to confess at last that your labour has been lost! Your only chance, then, is the fire; and if the actual cautery fails, there is no longer any hope. As in learning to scale properly, you must come to sacrifice a great many coins before you can hope to succeed, fiat experimentum in corpore vili—begin with those that are worthless. Never mind scratching a Faustina's face; set no store by Nero; you may, if you like, mutilate as many Domitians as that emperor mutilated flies. For why?—they cost nothing; unless, indeed, there were something to be gained by reversing the picture. But this only while learning, and to learn; for when you know how to clean a coin properly, you will hardly waste your time in adding new Trajans to the ten thousands already in existence; nor whet your curiosity or steel upon an empress, known to be as common in bronze as she was wont to be in the flesh! When you have a really valuable coin, on which your pains will not be thrown away, your mode of procedure is, first to scrape, with extreme caution, on some small spot by the margin, till you have taken your proper soundings, and come down to the patina. Your next step must be, to ascertain whether that patina is hard, or soft and friable; in which latter case you will have to use all diligence not to poke your penknife in Crispina's eyeball, nor to wound her husband, with a few days' beard upon his chin. No healing process can help you here to undo your clumsy surgery and want of skill. He will remain cicatrised, and she lippa for life. Each separate feature requires renewed care. When your minute manipulations have brought out the eyeball unspecked, then comes the nose; and to remove the closely sticking plaster from its side, and expose uninjured the curling nostril underneath, requires more than Taliacotian sleight of hand to manage properly. You must not trifle with Faustina's hair, nor with Philip's beard. The "flava coma," which we do not consider as ornamental at any time, looks far worse in brass than in golden tresses. You must be an aurist when you come to the ear. Deal with the ear, and remember that it has its portio mollis as you gently probe your way into its tube. Need we insist upon the necessity of respecting a lady's lips? and yet you will wound them, unless you are careful. And when all is done, you may find that your coin is no sooner cleaned, than it is seized with the smallpox,[61] which will become confluent and spread, unless properly instructed. You have probed each cicatrix to the bottom, and filled the minute holes with ink. Thus you will see that patience, tact, and care are all required in scaling a coin; or, as Dedomenicis said, ci vuo il genio!
The collecting coins is a pleasant way of learning the chronology of the royal families of antiquity; and if you are culpably negligent in their arrangement, the first dealer who sees your cabinet takes care to apprize you of your mistakes, and will generally rate you soundly as he does so. The first time Dedomenicis visited our collection of the Roman emperors, he was in a great taking on detecting (which he did not fail to do at a glance) various anachronisms in our arrangement. "By all that should be, if here is not Agrippina the wife of Germanicus, and Claudius's Agrippina, in next-door neighbourhood! the two Faustinas (che scandalo, dottore mio!) lying side by side with strange husbands! Philip junior deposing his own father—ci avevano questa consuetudine, so let that pass; but here is a more serious affair. Pray separate all these Julias a little, my dear sir, caro lei, (looking at us very reproachfully;) here, in this one tray, you have mixed, introduced, and confounded together all the Julias of the Roman empire! Julia, the daughter of Titus, alone in her right place beside her first consort Domitian. But Julia Pia and Julia Domna are but the aliases of the same empress, the wife of Septimius Severus; and here you have placed by mistake Julia Paula, the wife of Eliogabalus, after Julia Mammæa, who you must remember married Maximin. Pray attend to these things; and whenever your series is deficient, leave vacant spaces in your trays to mark the deficiencies. Don't crowd your emperors thus together, when time has separated them in history," &c. &c. &c. We promised faithfully to attend to these hints; but it was all to no purpose, for in one week our friends, to whom we used to show our collection properly arranged, would again involve our chronology in inextricable confusion, especially certain dear young ladies of our acquaintance, who, by no means showing the same respect for old Time that old Time continued to demonstrate towards them, would make light of whole centuries; and we have known them so regardless of all dates, except perhaps their own, as to bring up a Constantine or Maxentius, and to place them under the very nose of Augustus!
THE LAST RECOLLECTIONS OF NAPOLEON.[62]
There are few things more striking than the analogy in civil and physical changes of the world. There have been in the history of man periods as distinctive as in the history of nations. From these periods society and nations have alike assumed new aspects, and the world has commenced a new career. The fall of the Roman Empire was the demarcation between the old world and the new. It was the moral deluge, out of which a new condition of man, new laws, new forms of religion, new styles of thought, almost a totally new configuration of human society, were to arise. A new settlement of the civil world took place: power absorbed by one race of mankind was to be divided among various races; and the development of principles of government and society, hitherto unknown, was to be scarcely less memorable, less unexpected, or less productive, than that voyage by which Columbus doubled the space of the habitable globe.
The Reformation was another mighty change. It introduced civil liberty into the empire of tyranny, religion into the realm of superstition, and science into the depths of national ignorance. The French Revolution was the last, and not the least powerful change within human experience. Its purpose is, like its operation, still dubious. Whether it came simply for wrath, or simply for restoration—whether, like the earthquake of Lisbon, it came only to destroy, and leave its ruins visible for a century to come; to clear the ground of incumbrances too massive for the hand of man, and open the soil for exertions nobler than the old, must be left to time to interpret. But there can be no question, that the most prominent agency, the most powerful influence, and the most dazzling lustre, of a period in which all the stronger impulses of our being were in the wildest activity, centred in the character of one man, and that man—Napoleon.
It is evidently a law of Providence, that all the great changes of society shall be the work of individual minds. Yet when we recollect the difficulty of effecting any general change, embracing the infinite varieties of human interests, caprices, passions, and purposes, nothing could seem more improbable. But it has always been the course of things. Without Charlemagne, the little principalities of Gothic Europe would never have been systematised into an empire;—without Luther, what could have been the progress of the Reformation?—without Napoleon, the French Revolution would have burnt itself out, vanished into air, or sunk into ashes. He alone collected its materials, combined them into a new and powerful shape, crowned this being of his own formation with the imperial robe, erected it in the centre of Europe, and called the nations to bow down before a new idol, like the gods of the Indian known only by its mysterious frown, the startling splendour of its diadem, and the swords and serpents grasped in its hands.