The Confessions of a Collector

by William Carew Hazlitt

My appurtenances in this direction embrace: 1. Greek and Roman; 2. Continental; 3. English and Scotish; 4. American; 5. Oriental. The last-named occupy a space proportionate to the narrowness of their appeal to my sympathy. The money of the ancients, more especially that of Greece, when one casts one’s eyes on its portraiture, symbols, legends, fabric, and costume, I treasure as everlastingly impressive testimony to the force of soil, climate, and social and religious conditions, and as the basis of every essay of any pretensions in collecting. The difficulties and dangers are unusually great, as the disparities of estimated value are great; and the liability to error and deception are manifold. The wholesale official system at home of multiplying autotype copies of rare and valuable pieces originated in a sound idea; but has been carried too far, and forms an inducement to impose reproductions on inexperienced persons already perplexed by encountering casts and other forgeries; and then, again, the Greek and Roman series are a constant mark for the ingenious foreigner, who has busied himself, as we have all heard, ever so long since in fabricating for enthusiastic admirers of the antique the almost unfailing lacunæ in their cabinets. Some classes of coins are more subject to falsification than others. The Athenian gold and the Bactrian silver are very favourite game for the Gentile, the Jew, and the Mahometan alike. They forget their religious antagonism in a fraternal community of aim.

I have referred to the Bactrian coinage as having been extensively forged. But there has strangely accumulated, since those days, when the surviving number was almost computable on the fingers, a vast chronological monument, disclosing to our eyes a marvellous Oriental legend of mighty rulers and long, prosperous reigns, coins their only historians. I was favoured by the Museum authorities with an early glance at the magnificent purchase from General Cunningham of his Bactrian numismatic collection for £3000, by virtue of a special parliamentary grant; and this has at once placed our national cabinet in a most satisfactory and enviable position in this respect.

Of the money of upward of thirty kings of this region—the ancient Affghanistan—the silver is now copiously represented, but not so the gold or the copper. I tell the story of the 20-stater piece, in the most precious metal, of Eukratides, King of Bactria, in my Coin-Collector. Of the copper or bronze I have long owned a very beautiful example, probably of Heliocles; in my state these latter productions are peculiarly rare. Never was such a case of Time drawing Truth out of a well; and we have not reached the end of the matter yet. There will be further discoveries.

Here is a conspicuous instance of the peril attendant on giving extravagant prices for coins of supposed rarity. There are among the Bactrians silver tetradrachms and smaller denominations, which can be bought for fewer shillings than they once commanded sovereigns. My obolos of Demetrius, for example, cost 15s.; it is valued by Mionnet at £16. But you must exercise particular caution in this direction for the reason, which I have assigned. I shall be entirely satisfied, if I succeed in procuring a selection affording a competent idea of the prevailing character and costume of the whole, of which the earlier reigns are immeasurably the more desirable; a complete sequence is out of the question; even the British Museum under the most favourable conditions does not possess it—perhaps never will.

I really think that with the poorer coin-collector it is the same as with his analogue in the book market. The most beautiful and most interesting objects in the Greek and Roman coinages are well within his means of attainment, if he chooses to wait and watch, provided that he cares to do what the present deponent did, do his best to eke out his deficiency of resources with acquired knowledge and discrimination. In that case he may rise one morning the owner of an assemblage of these delightful and educating remains, and may ask himself the question, in what manner and degree it differs from those most famous and most frequently quoted in our numismatic records. He will find that what he lacks in common with all, who have not bottomless purses, are just the rare denominations or values, or types, of which he may probably possess examples substantially identical—perhaps in superior condition.

Take the Roman gold of the late Mr Hyman Montagu. That gentleman suddenly conceived it to be his mission to become master, not merely of all the really interesting coins in that metal and series; but it was peremptory that he should outdo everybody else, and be able to proclaim that he had every gold piece struck by every obscure and insignificant ruler down to the fall of the empire; and I believe that he was gratified. He could plead nothing for his project beyond its completeness; and that very feature was its weak point. Think how infinitely preferable it is to select the best; they are to be had at moderate prices; they appeal to everyone, who has a fair degree of culture; and they occupy less room. The rarities are usually of poor work and fabric as well as of princes, who reigned just long enough to stamp their names and effigies on a circular disc of gold. Mr Montagu, however, felt bound to draw a broad line of distinction between humbler aspirants and himself; and he erected this monument to his memory.

It is much the same thing with the Greek in all its varieties and ramifications, of which, no less than of the Roman, I furnish a comprehensive sketch in my Coin-Collector. The money of ephemeral rulers and governments, or high and unusual denominations, like the Syracusan medallion or 10-drachma piece form the trying part and aspect of an undertaking. I soon discovered that I could command even with a slender purchasing power all that was essential to enable me to comprehend the monetary story of the most remarkable, and one of the greatest, empires of the ancient world. When I turned over the pages of the Carfrae, Ashburnham, Montagu and Bunbury catalogues, it was easy to perceive how these grand collections assumed such bewildering and fatiguing proportions; and I saw to my surprise that, rather than forego a particular item, condition was often waived.

I thought that I discerned, for private connoisseurs as distinguished from great institutions like the British Museum, a radical error of judgment and policy here, and I congratulate myself on having avoided it. Condition, on which I shall have something more to say by-and-by, I could and can understand; and as I have never regretted losing a dear coin, I have never regretted letting a poor one pass. But I have seen with complacency my rich friends snatch out of my hands some things, which I should have been content to have at my estimate; and if I am patient they will fall to me another day. I take what comes, and am thankful. At one of the numerous Montagu sales a piece realised £2, 10s. I dare say that it passed through one or two hands; but it became mine at last for half-a-sovereign.

I must change the scene. I was never led away in respect to the money of the United Kingdom, not even by patriotism, so far as to find funds and accommodation for every constituent part of every series within these lines. If I were not an Englishman, I should declare unreservedly that a less interesting, more monotonous, and worse executed body of material than the coinages of England, Scotland, Ireland, and their dependencies, with certain emphatic exceptions, does not exist. It has asked all my loyalty to overcome an instinctive repugnance to the uncouth abortions struck as currency by our British, Anglo-Saxon, and many of our Anglo-Norman, progenitors. You may contemplate the entire gallery and succession in numismatic books, with autotype reproductions of these caricatures. A heavy proportion of them are barbarous and feeble imitations of Greek, Roman, and mediæval patterns. Perhaps in art and style they resemble most closely the Gaulish and Visigothic series. If we reserve one or two types of Offa of Mercia and Alfred the Great, the commonest are the best, because they were struck under the authority of sovereigns, whose power was established. I put to myself the question at a very early stage, how many representatives was it necessary for me to assemble before me of these classes or schools of production? The answer is readable in the presence of fifty or sixty Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans; and I have no courage to swell their ranks. When I look at them, I can find nothing to justify the cost of their maintenance but the weak little sentiment, that these pieces of gold, silver, copper, or tin passed from hand to hand, when the part, where I am a dweller, was a dark, swampy forest, with a few squalid huts dotted here and there, and that one or two of these bits of money may have been in the pouch of Cymbeline, or Krause (vulgo Carausius) or Alfred. In fact, I have a silver penny of the royal Cake-Burner, which weighs two grains more than any other known; it was Colonel Murchison’s; but possibly it had previously belonged to the king himself!

Seriously speaking, our native currencies acquired their value and rank only, when the French and Low Country types began to attract notice and emulation; and I should be satisfied with drawing the line at Edward III. as a commencing point and at Anne as a finishing one. The view is by no means original; I have met with several, who averted their eyes from the peculiarly humble and uncouth beginnings of the British people in this way; and the late Mr Montagu parted long before his death, on the ground of their dearth of interest, with the whole of his Hanoverian collections.