Page images
PDF
EPUB

of plate may be moulded with the greatest exactness, showing the minutest chasing and engraving, and even the hammermarks of the original, as well as the hall-mark itself." It appears to us as though a band of forgers had thus moulded one or two fine ancient models, and had then fabricated pieces in which the details of the originals are variously blended, and reproduced as antique pieces. Sometimes the London hall-mark is boldly affixed to these, whether by actual forgery or by transposition depends on having an old spoon or pattern with a good mark ready to their hands. But the region in which the forger especially delights to range is that of England, out of the metropolitan district. Out of this undefined district come numerous pieces bearing the old Newcastle, or what is said to be the old Newcastle, mark. With Exeter and Norwich the same liberty is taken; and even the crowned X and the Radcliffe and Easton of the former city have not escaped these unprincipled imitations.

As for the means of detection suggested by Mr. Chaffers, they are such as can hardly be applied until after the deception has been successful, and the piece has passed from the hands of the forger to that of the collector. It is not every one who is in a position on the instant to have a piece which he wishes to purchase assayed, to ascertain if its separate pieces are of the same alloy, or to detect the edge of a transposed hall-mark by applying the fumes of sulphur, or by the use of the blow-pipe. These are the tests rather for the exposure of fraud after it has been accomplished in the sale of a fabricated article, and they are practically ineffectual, because few men, when they have been cheated, would care to take so much pains to reveal their own folly. The real weapons against such deceptions consist in caution and good advice. Few people would venture to buy a professed diamond or other precious stone on their own judgment, lest that should happen to them which befell a noted foreign millionaire, who bought for a large price a reputed sapphire, which was fortunately found to be only an antique paste before he had completed the purchase. Fewer still would buy on their own judgment a fine coin-or, to come down to more domestic matters, a fine horse-unless in each case they had special knowledge, and were diamond dealers, numismatists, or, as the case might be, horse breeders. The same rule holds good with plate in these collecting days. The time is long past when, in any provincial town, or, for that matter, in shops in London streets, plate of the time of Queen Anne, and occasionally choice pieces of earlier reigns, and more especially spoons, could be bought at a moderate price. In our own experience

[blocks in formation]

384

[ocr errors]

what are commonly called Apostle spoons, or seal-heauft spoons, or, rarer still, slipped spoons, which mark the mixtur a Puritanical leaven into society, have gradually risen from or 17. a-piece to 61 or 71. for very ordinary examples. twenty years ago, long before the Tichborne family was st famous in the trials of the age, a dozen of Apostle spoons he longing to the cousin of the real Roger Tichborne were solc Christie's. We remember thinking that we might buy them i 501, but our bidding soon grew into 1507., and when we desister the biddings still went on, till they were knocked down for a sum closely approaching 400, to some one whom we then regarder as a lunatic. If these spoons were put up to auction to-morrow it is more than probable that they would realise 10002, a sum which, in our opinion, would be exceeded by a set of twakt Apostle spoons bearing the date 1519, and purchased by Mr. Staniforth at the sale of the Bernal Collection. such prices, when forgeries abound, and when every one who is In the face of in possession of a genuine thing-be it picture, print, china precious stone, or plate-is well aware of its worth, and probably puts an exaggerated value on it, what more can we do than repeat to the intending plate buyer those two words-caution and good advice? Of one thing he may be quite certain, that if he fortifies himself with these two requisites, he will never rain himself in buying what we call old English plate, by which term we mean plate made before the Great Civil War.

Every one who has the means may in a few years make a good collection of Caroline or Queen Anne plate. He will have to pay handsomely for the last; and as yet it has not proved remunerative enough to attract much attention from our ingenious forgers, though how long this happy state of things may last we decline to say. There is still plenty of it, and it has to some eyes a beauty of its own in its plainness and general poverty of design. So also there is a sufficient quantity of Caroline plate-that is. of plate made between 1660 and 1690-still existing to afford occasional fine pieces, and so to make a market. But if he confines his attention to the days before 1660 he will have to wait years before he can pick up ten or a dozen pieces, setting spoons aside. In a celebrated collection dispersed last year, and which was more than a quarter of a century in collection, there were not more than thirty pre-Caroline pieces; in Mr. Dexter's not more than ten ; and in Lord Willoughby's sale only one. So scarce is plate of this quality that, as we have said, a collector can hardly ruin himself, even if he pays the enormous prices which genuine pieces fetch. ruin himself if he falls into the hands of the forgers, and in a Of course he may

year

6

6

year or two acquires a whole sideboard of real old English plate. Mr. Chaffers, with an honest indignation that his book, which affords so much valuable information to collectors, should have been turned to base advantage by forgers, recommends the consideration of this subject by the Government. According to him, the perpetrators of forged hall-marks should be sought for with diligence, and visited with condign punishment.' In this we quite agree; the only question is-as the landowner said, who saw his mangold eaten by his neighbour's rabbits—how to catch them. It is of course incumbent, as he declares, upon the authorities to use their best endeavours to put a stop to such practices,' but, unfortunately, what we may be forgiven for calling the incumbency' of a duty, does not always secure its fulfilment. It is all very well to say that all 'spurious plate should be seized wherever it may be found, and the dealer be made amenable and subject to penalties, as in France,' but this is just one of the things we suspect which they manage in France, from the severity of their laws, better than we do here in England. The Solicitor to the Treasury-that much-worked man-or the Master and Wardens of the Goldsmiths' Company might seize plate and indict dealers, and after all discover that that great Constitutional safeguard, a British jury, might find -especially if hoodwinked by experts, and well-handled by clever counsel-that so far as they could see, these spurious pieces did not differ in the least from genuine pieces of old plate; and so the fraudulent dealer would depart on the path of his nefarious practices, rejoicing. We have seen the view which an enlightened British jury took of transpositions and additions, in the year 1849, in the case submitted to them by Lord Denman, and we do not think that their powers of discrimination have much improved since that period. What protection then remains for the unwary collector? None in the existing state of the law, but that contained in the old legal maxim— as sound now as it ever was-caveat emptor.

ART.

ART. IV.-1. Origines de la France Contemporaine. Par H. Taine. Tome I. L'Ancien Régime. Deuxième édition. Paris, 1876.

2. On the State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789, and on the Causes which led to that Event. By Alexis de Tocqueville, Member of the French Academy. Translated by Henry Reeve, D.C.L. Second edition, with seven additional Chapters. London, 1873.

3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sa Vie et ses Ouvrages. Par SaintMarc-Girardin. Avec une Introduction par M. Ernest Bersot, Membre de l'Institut. 2 vols. Paris, 1875.

IT required

6

T required an intellectual intrepidity, in which M. Taine is not deficient (witness his Gallic invasion and conquest of the whole domain of English literature), to project the completion of a work which Tocqueville had left unfinished,—the work of tracing the formation and development of contemporary France through the Ancien Régime,' the Revolution, and the successive ephemeral Governments which followed. In his present volume he carries that enterprise no farther than Tocqueville had already proceeded with it, and he works, as he could not otherwise than work, on the lines laid down by his precursor.*

6

The French Revolution, as it is truly observed by Tocqueville, will remain inscrutably dark to those who fix their eyes upon itself exclusively. The only light which can clear up that darkness must be sought in the times preceding it.' Not less truly it might be said that France, as she now is, can only be understood by tracing the distinctive characters of that revolution to their original sources in the previous state of France under the old régime.

We suppose there is no instance of an order of things, in the midst of an active-minded and progressive people, surviving for centuries its original raison d'être-its social and national utility -so extraordinary as that which was afforded, down to the 4th of

* Mr. Reeve, in bringing out, two or three years back, a second edition of his translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's admirable essay on 'L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution,' has judiciously added, for the benefit of English readers, seven more chapters, published since Tocqueville's death by his literary executor, the late Gustave de Beaumont, and forming imperfect but interesting fragments of continuation of that work. Those who may not have facility or opportunity of reading in the original French all that Tocqueville has left on the subject of the old régime, and the earlier stages of the Revolution, cannot do better than avail themselves of Mr. Reeve's translation as the best substitute for the text of the distinguished author.

August,

August, 1789, by the old feudalism of France, with all its oppressive incidents. If we were asked, What made the French Revolution the terrible thing it was? we should answer in three words-The French Monarchy. The persistent policy of the French monarchy for centuries had been to paralyse and annul in action every independent organisation in France but its own; and when it was itself struck at last with a like paralysis, no resisting power was left against the popular masses. Had not Louis XIV. been able to say, with truth, L'État, c'est moi!' the populace of Paris might never have been able to boast, 'La Nation, c'est nous!'

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

M. Taine divides into five sections his study of the old régime in his present volume, entitled respectively-1. The Structure of Society;' 2. Manners and Characters; 3. The [revolutionary] Spirit and Doctrine;' 4. The Propagation of the Doctrine; 5. The People.'

It may be laid down as a general rule, admitting but few exceptions, that most arrangements and most disarrangements between class and class-between man and man-are concerned, directly or indirectly, with money, or money's worth. Without disputing Mr. Carlyle's dictum that cash-payment never can be the sole nexus between man and man, we find, nevertheless, cash-payment, or some ruder equivalent in simpler times, the most universally current mode of recognition of service given and received. So long as the service is in some shape rendered, men do not grudge the payment; or, at any rate, whether or not grudgingly, they feel they must make it. The clergy and feudal nobility of France had performed for the people, during the darkest ages of European history, the services most indispensable to soul and body-to spiritual and secular protection from utter disorganisation and despair. The clergy alone opened and multiplied asylums for the conquered and oppressed over the whole territory. The clergy alone preserved in its churches and convents all that remained of the arts and acquirements of antiquity; alone held the pen in the councils of long-haired and hard-headed men of war; alone vindicated the reign of law, the sanctities of religion, property, and marriage. The nobles alone (valour then constituted nobility) rallied round them all who could bear arms and who would submit to vassalage as the price of protection :

'In a time of permanent war,' says M. Taine, 'one régime only is good-that of armed force posted in the presence of the enemy. Such is the régime of feudalism. One could live at least, or begin again to live, under its steel-gloved hand. Under the double title of Sovereign and proprietor, the seigneur reserved for himself the waste

lands,

« PreviousContinue »