imposition of a duty of sixpence in the ounce on all silver plate, a duty which in 1815 was raised to eighteen-pence, at which it now stands. If the reader will now look backwards on the information as to hall-marks which we have afforded him, he will find that all plate bearing the London mark with five marks must be modern, that is, less than one hundred years old. There are undoubtedly some fine pieces of modern make; for instance, the magnificent silver cisterns presented by the British Government to the arbitrators who settled the American difficulty at Geneva. These were made by Messrs. Garrard, the Royal Goldsmiths, and will stand comparison with those splendid cisterns of the reign of Queen Anne, of which the late Lord Chesterfield, the Earl of Jersey, the late Lord Hastings, and the Marquis of Exeter are, or were, the fortunate possessors. That belonging to Lord Jersey is especially interesting, though it is by no means the largest, as being the manufacture of Child, the goldsmith of Charles II.'s reign, and founder of the Bank which still flourishes under his name. But, as a general rule, plate made since 1784 is poor in design, and unworthy of the notice of a true collector. Carrying on our retrospect from 1784 up to the days of Queen Anne, we come to what may be called the paradise of platebuyers. As we approach the year 1700, plate, and especially plain, solid, old English plate, is more and more abundant. Every one who has the fancy may have a chance of acquiring a twohandled cup, a pair of candlesticks, or, at least, a dozen of rat-tailed spoons, as they are called, because of the stripe which runs down the back of the bowl, another relic of the time when the bowl and shank of the spoon were made in separate pieces. There are, we should say, tons of this plate in the country, and it ought to be much more moderate in price than it is, if abundance of an object affords any measure of its value. Where, however, there are anxious buyers there will always be exorbitant sellers, and here, as elsewhere, the price of a thing is what it will fetch. The days are long past when, as at the Stowe sale, in what may be called the dark age of plate-buying, rat-tailed spoons could be bought at the melting-price, or a little above it, and when magnificent plateaux were actually melted for want of a buyer. Two, three, and four guineas an ounce are now readily given for fine spoons of that period; and as for more important pieces, we cannot mark the recent rise in their value better than by stating that a belted cup, bought a very few years back for 30l. at the Hastings' sale, realised no less a sum than 1677., when a celebrated collection was dispersed last summer at Christie's. The explanation of this rise is to be found in two facts: one,

that

that Queen-Anne plate is now the rage; the other, that the forgers, who have been at work at the earlier cycles, have as yet hardly tried their cunning on plate of Queen Anne's time. We say hardly, because we have recently seen some very suspicious pieces of that date. But up to the present time buyers have spent their money freely, in the belief that all plate which professed to be of the reign of that Queen was genuine, and so their comfort would have been complete were there not occasionally something awkward and unforeseen in the marks which interfered with their content. What this something is we will now explain, and we only wish that all the dark passages connected with plate-marks were capable of as satisfactory a solution.

It will be remembered that we have laid it down as a rule that all pieces of plate made after the year 1545 should have the lion passant on them. A rule, however, that is without an exception is scarcely a rule. It is like a sum without a proof. We will suppose a collector of Queen Anne plate, bearing this rule in his head, to fall on a piece of plate in which the date-letter is in the second cycle of that Court-hand which we have mentioned, and which has a maker's mark, but on which the two remaining marks are quite different. One of these, if the stamps are pretty plain, and not rubbed off by generations of laborious butlers, he may discover to be the figure of Britannia with her shield and trident; the other, if he be ever so little of a herald, he will describe as a lion's head erased, that is, not as Mr. Chaffers calls, it separate, or without the body,' but torn roughly off with a jagged edge, in contradistinction to coupée. The questions which will arise in his mind will be, 'What do these marks mean?' and' Is the piece genuine?' We proceed to ease his mind by informing him that the piece is not only genuine but of better silver than in the ordinary standard; and as for the meaning of the marks, they denote an alteration in the standard made in the reign of William and Mary. The following is the account of the way in which these marks arose, as given by the anonymous writer whom we have already quoted. In early times in England there has been a great tendency in the wealthier classes to invest or to hoard their savings in the form of plate. It was something like that feeling which induces the small Indian capitalist to carry all his worldly goods about with him in gold bangles or anklets. A plate collector has only to read the list of plate left behind them before the Wars of the Roses by Englishmen of every position, to be filled with despair that such a vast amount of costly property should have been melted down. No doubt almost all these accumulated hoards

vanished in the troubles of the fifteenth century. But no sooner were peace and security established under Henry VII. and his successor, than we find the same spirit as lively as ever. The wardrobe accounts of the Tudor Sovereigns, and the wills of their subjects, sufficiently attest the amount of silver and gold annually devoted from the Mint and the bullion market to be manufactured into plate. So it went on till the bad times and the hard times of the Great Civil War came. It is matter of history how much plate was melted on either side. Here went almost all the College plate at our two Universities into His Most Sacred Majesty's mint at Oxford; and here, on the other hand, the sideboards of the great City Companies, and the cupboards of well-to-do citizens of London and other great towns, were swept clean to find the sinews of war for the Parliament and Commonwealth. Here and there a Founder's cups and spoons at Oxford and Cambridge were spared ; but, as a general rule, between 1638 and 1648 the bulk of the plate of the country went to the melting-pot. But at the Restoration, when the King got his own again and Charles II. led his merry life in the Great Gallery at Whitehall, the goldsmiths and silversmiths had again a good time of it. Plate was manufactured in great quantities, and bullion took that shape rather than the stamp of money. So it went on till the Revolution, and of that troublous time one might parody the well-known lines, and say, "Woe to the land, to panic fears a prey,

Where plate accumulates and coins decay."

So it was that when Dutch William came to the throne there was great lack of bullion for the Mint, and he and his advisers were at their wit's end what to do. At last they devised a plan, and we find it embodied in a statute of the 8th and 9th of William and Mary, ch. 8, sec. 1, by which it was enacted "that any persons who shall bring any sort of wrought plate between the 1st of January, 1696, and the 4th of March, 1697, into any of his Majesty's mints shall be paid 5s. 4d. an ounce for the same;" and then the section proceeds to say, "that all London hall-marked plate should be taken as sterling without waiting for a fresh assay." Of course, as 5s. 4d. an ounce was much above the market-price of silver bullion, King William and his advisers reckoned that vast quantities of plate would be brought into the Mint, and this proved to be the case. Of all the destroyers of old English plate, none in his generation was greater than William III. Those months between January, 1696, and November, 1697, were fatal to many a noble piece of Caroline plate. But how did all this affect the standard of English

plate?

plate? For a very plain and sufficient reason. Having got the plate of the country converted into coin, King William's object was to keep it in that shape. He did not wish his coins to be melted into plate, as had been the tendency of all times before his own. But how was this to be prevented? By a very simple expedient. Sect. 9 of the same ch. 8 declares, "And whereas it might reasonably be suspected that part of the silver coins of the realm had been, by persons regarding their private gain more than the public good, molten and converted into vessels of silver or other manufactured plate, which crime had been the more easily perpetrated by them, in regard the goldsmiths and other makers of plate by the former laws and statutes of the realm were not obliged to make their plate finer than the sterling or standard ordained for the moneys of the realm ". and then enacts that from and after the 25th of March, 1697, no silver plate should be made of less fineness than that of 11 oz. 10 dwts. of fine silver in every pound Troy, the old standard having been 11 oz. 2 dwts., and no piece of plate was to be put to sale until such time as it had been duly stamped with the marks of the new standard, those marks being, for the maker's mark, the two first letters of his surname, and for the marks of the mystery or craft of goldsmiths, instead of the leopard's head and the lion, "the figure of a woman, commonly called Britannia," and the figure of a lion's head erased. Of course, as the standard for silver plate was so much higher than that for coin, it was not possible to melt coin at once into plate, and so the King's object was gained.' Thus far the anonymous writer, to whose explanation we would add the remark, that though it was not possible to melt coin into plate without an additional alloy of fine silver, and thus the statute might have had some deterring effect on goldsmiths bold enough to commit the 'crime' in question, it could not prevent coin being melted with a view of turning it into plate by such a mixture as that to which we have alluded. But whether it had this effect or not, the statute remained in force till 1719, when, by an Act of the 6th of George I., the old standard was restored, though the new standard was not abolished; so that, since 1739 there have been two standards for silver plate-the old, of 11 oz. 2 dwts.; and the new, or Britannia standard, of 11 oz. 10 dwts. in the pound Troythough, as might be supposed, little plate has been manufactured of the new standard since the Act of William was altered.

The reader is now in possession of all the information which we are able to afford him as to his five marks, and especially with regard to the new standard. Let him not be afraid to purchase a fine bit of Queen Anne plate, if he hears it is only Britannia,'

6

as

as though it were of base Birmingham manufacture, for it is in reality 8 dwts. in the ounce purer silver than pieces wrought in the ordinary standard. Nor let us forget to call his attention that a great alteration was made by King William's Act in the makers' mark. Before that statute the maker enjoyed perfect freedom in this respect. He might put his initials fancifully interlaced, or in monogram; or he might choose, as was common in earlier times, some emblem-a rose, a crown, a star. All that the Goldsmiths' Company required was, that every maker should have his own proper mark, known to the wardens or to the surveyor of the Company. How graceful many of those marks were, may be seen by the table of marks stamped on a copperplate still preserved in Goldsmiths' Hall, and which we imagine to be those which the Company recognised between the burning of their Hall in 1666, and the year 1697. Before the Great Fire earlier plates of makers' marks no doubt existed. This now alone remains; and Mr. Chaffers has done well to engrave it as the frontispiece of his new edition. With the Act of William what may be called the poetry of the makers' marks perished. Little could be made out of the first and second letters of a maker's surname. Besides, if, as was likely, there were many makers at once rejoicing in the names of Smith, or Williams, or Jones, or Brown, how could their marks be distinguished? Nor is the existing arrangement much better. By the 12th of George II., in 1739, the maker's mark has been declared to be the initials of his Christian and surname; so, if two John Smiths, or two John Jones, make plate, their mark will be precisely the same.

We now sum up this part of our inquiry. From the present day up to 1784 all English plate, whether of the old or the new standard, bears, or has borne, five marks-the Sovereign's head, the lion passant, the date-letter, the leopard's head crowned, and the maker's mark; but in the case of the new standard, the lion passant and the leopard's head crowned give place to the figure of Britannia and the lion's head erased. Before 1784 the marks are four in number, and since the year 1719 there have been two standards for silver-plate, the old and the new, which new standard was obligatory for all pieces made between 1696 and 1719. In 1739 the maker's mark was fixed at the initials of his Christian and surname, and in 1696 at the two first letters of his surname. Before that date the maker was free to choose his own mark; and, in passing, we may observe that in those days of freedom he never exhibited the gross want of taste so remarkably displayed in the selection of modern trade-marks. Between 1696 and 1545 there were