The numismatic chronicle and journal of the Royal Numismatic Society

234 G. F. HILL.
steel, which would thus give us the necessary negative ;
and suppose that this was hardened and used as a die.
If the plaques are really stamped, I confess that this
seems to me the only possible way in which the dies
could have been produced. It would account for the
exact reproduction, within the sunk portions, of those
marks of the engraver's tool which, as I have said,
prove that acid was not used.
We may now consider the opposite theory, that each
plaque was separately engraved ; and here we are
fortunate in having a very precise statement of the
case by Sir Sidney Colvin, as it appeared to him after
a prolonged examination of the question with the help
of expert engravers. I may be allowed to say that as
a practical metal-engraver Mr. Littlejohn of the British
Museum entirely endorses this view. I quote from
Sir Sidney Colvin's Early Engravers and Engraving
in England (1905), p.
103 :
The extant repetitions of any given plaque appealidentical
in every stroke, except in certain instances where
a definite change has been made by the introduction of a
pearl ornament or the like. This identity has caused some
collectors and experts (including so high an authority as
Sir John Evans) to suppose that after one original plaque
had been engraved in each case, a die was made from it and
the remaining examples struck from the die. But it is
extremely doubtful whether such a fine network of sharp
.lozenges and straight and curved ridges as this supposition
implies could possibly have been cut, sunk, or bitten into a
die by any.method then known, and still more whether such
die (supposing its existence possible) could have been so
tempered and so managed as to strike with the necessary
force and evenness on these thin metal plates.
Moreover, a
minute examination of the lines, in examples of which the
black filling has been removed, shows positively that they
are engraved lines, all the characteristic cuts of the different
kinds of graver appearing quite clearly under the magnifying-glass.
Every practical engraver and silversmith to whom