My friend acted on a different principle from that, which I should have followed with ample funds at my command. I would have secured a few first-rate examples, as he did, to some extent, in china. He had bought Chelsea figures, when they were at reasonable prices, and he gave only £3, 10s. for a set of four (out of five) beakers of the same porcelain, painted with exotic birds on a dark blue ground. Benjamin bade him £50 for them; but he quietly remarked: ‘If they are worth that to you, they are worth as much to me.’ This was a favourite saying of his; he would draw out the expert, and then shut him up so. He never ceased to lament the Lazarus salver.
At a sale at Christie’s a young man present heard a valuable piece of plate going for 15s. (as he thought), and it struck him that it would be a nice present for a young woman of his acquaintance; and at 16s. it was his. The auctioneer’s clerk forthwith solicited a deposit of £20. There was a gesture of impatience from the salesman, accompanied by a general titter, and the lot was put up again.
£10 per ounce may be regarded as a maximum figure even for fine early work; but this limit is constantly exceeded; it was the other day, when some cinque cento example reached £22. The Edmund Bury Godfrey tankard realised £525 in 1895, and weighed only 35 oz. 18 dwt. The Blacksmiths’ Cup, once belonging to that Gild, has been more than once sold under the hammer. It was bought by Ralph Bernal about sixty years since at £1 per ounce; but on the last occasion it exceeded £10. The cup weighs 35 oz. The Irish collection of Mr Robert Day, of Cork, dispersed at two intervals, the last in 1894, eclipsed the normal standard of value, as it embraced some of the finest extant specimens of the workmanship of the silversmiths or hammerers of Cork, Youghal, and other Irish localities.
Antiquities in metal-work have their share of romance. Bargains fall to the vigilant or the experienced seeker. We have all heard of the solid silver picture frames at Beddington, the seat of the Carews, as black as ink, and bought by the Jews at the price of ordinary material; and not so long since there was a house-sale at Wimbledon, where the trade acquired among them ornamental objects of solid gold, described in the auctioneer’s catalogue as silver-gilt.
There is no problem in commerce or in morality more difficult of solution than that, which is involved in the question of right on the part of persons, who in the first place make it their study, and in the second their livelihood, to outstrip and outwit the rest of the world in a particular sphere of industry, to combine together for their own profit and the defeat of what is termed legitimate competition. The contention on the other side is that these specialists are to waive their superior information for the benefit of proprietors, in whom they have no interest, and to whom they are under no obligation.
It awakened my personal attention to the cogent need of exercising the utmost care in sending plate to the cleaner and repairer, when a tankard of the George I. period returned home to me with part of the hall-mark obliterated. The piece had at one time been in daily use, and was slightly dented; and in straightening it the maker’s symbol suffered from encroachment. Sending your treasures of this class to the doctor’s is as parlous as committing a book or tract in old parchment or sheep to the mercy of the uncanny bibliopegist or a piece of unblemished porcelain to the duster of a charwoman.
The marks in the works by Chaffers and Cripps are not implicitly reliable, and a Manual furnishing actual facsimiles of them is still a deficiency. The same criticism applies to the monograph of Chaffers on Porcelain and Pottery. I was led to look into the question of hall-marks on old silver plate by seeing a spoon of Henry VIII.’s time with the leopard’s head, the animal’s mouth open, and the tongue protruding. This was also a mint-mark on some of the Anglo-Gallic money and on the groats of Henry VII. with the full-faced portrait.
My volume on the Livery Companies of London laid on me, among innumerable other duties, that of making the circuit of the Companies’ Halls, and of studying the admirable monograph of Mr Cripps. I had an opportunity, owing to an old friend being a past master, of reproducing the illustrations from the Clockmakers’ book of the plate belonging to that Gild; and I followed the same course with one or two others in a more limited measure. When I was dining at Merchant Taylors’ Hall one evening, I observed immediately in front of me at table a large silver salver, which I felt sure I had recently seen somewhere; but I only regained the clue, when I remembered that it was one of the examples engraved in my own work.