The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

Most of us have heard, among the famous Greeks and Romans, of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, Darius of Persia, Pyrrhus, Cleopatra, Julius Cæsar, Mark Antony, Augustus, Nero, and the Antonines; and it is customary for school-boys to explore the recesses of the penny box in shop or on stall in quest of pieces of bronze bearing the effigies of these ancient celebrities. School-boys have done this during centuries, and many of them have done nothing more. But here and there the child is father to the man, and the proprietor of a celebrated cabinet has it in his power to range over a life-long past wealthy in profitable and pleasant recollections, and to exhibit to his friends as a curiosity the humble piece, which first seduced him.

In the present case the pursuit dated from a maturer period, and I was debarred from such a privilege. I have learned much from coins; but I came to the study with a fair tincture of preparatory knowledge, and while I entertained becoming reverence for the great names of antiquity and of the Renaissance associated with it, I was old enough to be aware how many other claims it had on our attention and regard.

I turned to the ancient Greek series, I recollect, with the vague impression that it consisted of objects, which appealed to all persons of taste—an impression, which had been experienced by thousands before me, and which is perhaps generally due to conversation with more erudite acquaintance rather than to books. Works of reference come later. They did so with me. I had overheard talk of the grandeur and charm of design, the antiquity, the familiar names and myths; and perhaps someone let me see one or two, which struck me as curious, or some engravings of the school, which preceded autotype and other allied processes.

The end of it was that I bought a few inexpensive examples of Lincoln, and afterward, when it came to the turn of the Roman money, I was attracted by the beauty and cheapness of the Family or Consular series and by the ease, with which the second and third brass were obtainable. But it demanded a longer time than I care to own to enable me to perceive the affinity between the republican silver denarii and the productions of the professedly Hellenic school. If I had mingled with collectors, or consulted books or experts, I should have learned far more quickly and perfectly my self-set lesson. But I have never been gregarious or clubable; and I pursued my own way with the result that I committed an abundance of mistakes, yet not half so many as I deserved from my unbending persistence in depending on my personal researches and judgment.

This dogged opinionativeness and hard tone of mind have proved disadvantageous through life. I quitted school much more ignorant, I dare say, than I needed to have done, because it was not my cue or bent to comprehend what the teachers delivered, or to relish the methods, which they pursued; and the single point, which I brought away from my attendance at a twelve months’ course of lectures on Law and Jurisprudence at the Inner Temple, was the persuasion that in a particular line of argument, in which I happened to follow the lecturer, he was wrong. I hold a very kind note from Dr Phillimore, thanking me for my correction.

One of my numismatic illusions was the uniform low rate, at which the Roman consular denarii and other coins of that class, as well as the imperial currencies, could be secured in course of time. I soon found that a piece had only to be rare, or in gold, or rather exquisitely patinated, to stand out in high relief, and make a serious inroad on one’s resources. I have been fairly watchful and enterprising during the best part of twenty years, and my Greek and Roman collections still await several clear desiderata, not because those desiderata are scarce and expensive, but because they are typical. I possess about 400 pieces, perhaps, in all metals; five-and-twenty more would render my two series substantially representative. I shall get what I want by waiting. What I have suffices meanwhile to gratify my sense of that artistic and ideal genius, for which my elders had prepared me, so far as the Greek and Roman consular go, and my feeling for all that Rome has left behind it in grand personalities, splendid achievement, and records of thought and custom.

It cannot be fruitless or irrelevant to repeat that the magnitude of the most famous collections is chiefly owing to the presence of numberless varieties and sub-varieties of coins—even of unimportant ones. A man makes a principle of accumulating every year of the bronze money of the present reign, or farthings of every conceivable description, or maundy money. Cui bono? This is a course of policy which should be reserved for the public institution and the numismatic chronicler. I have a gold stater, perhaps of Philip of Macedon, an electrum one of Cyzicus or Lampsacus, a silver tetradrachm of Alexander the Great, and another of the Athenian Republic; I do not covet all the more or less slightly variant examples, which may exist. It is different, where the coin is remarkable in itself, and the type is distinct, as, for instance, in the contemporary and posthumous money of Alexander of Macedon, in the progressive improvement in the currency of Athens, in the specimens of Syracusan medallic art, which shew the stages, through which it passed; and in the pieces, which have preserved to us the likeness of such celebrities as Cleopatra, Julius Cæsar, Mark Antony, and which vary in certain physiognomical details. Here there is a more or less intelligible plea for repetition or redundancy. But in avoiding the admittance of practical duplicates I flatter myself that I have avoided a troublesome and costly error, which punishes you in two ways—when you acquire and when you realise. I have sometimes speculated why it is that I, for one, shut up books on coins after a short consultation and turn to the things themselves—the tangible realities. There must be somehow a cross with the magpie in one’s blood. The only kind of publication of a numismatic complexion, which strikes me as endurable, is that which is written on sympathetic lines, in a broadly appreciative temper and spirit. The dry calendars compiled by official experts, and the catalogues of auctions, are hard reading. They are mere lexicons or printed transfers.

Yet when I endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of one or two earlier writers, who gave wise prominence (as I thought) to the human and living interest resident in coins of all ages and countries in former times, I was reproved by the learned as too literary in my style, although in my larger book I afforded ample scope to the technical aspect of the question, and merely asserted my view by making it an independent section in distinct type. But the true cause of offence or disagreement was and is my presumption as a layman in trespassing on the preserves of Tom Tiddler.

It has been objected to my unusual width of range that it precludes full justice, as it is the fashion to call it, to any of the series. The reply to this, however, is obvious, and has already in fact been given. Unless a private cabinet is formed with a special eye to the official study of a group of coins or of the monetary products of a region, the object should be, not exhaustive treatment, which in the first place is impossible, but eclectic, which tends to familiarise the holder with the policy and progress of all nationalities in all parts of the globe from time to time in rendering media of exchange objects of interest, instruction and beauty, as well as of use.

A man emerges from the latter plan with a clearer and broader appreciation of the subject and its manifold bearings than he does, if he draws the line at a country, at a period, or at a type. It may be a just source of pride to be able to say that you are the existing repository of so many examples or varieties, of which no one else can boast the ownership; but, looking at the ultimate aim, it is not clear where the solid advantage lies.