THE COIN COLLECTOR - World eBook Library

GREEK COINS
ture or painting less durable than metal, and that on
many accounts the value of the intermediate grades of
excellence or improvement is equal to that of the most
finished examples by the greatest masters. It is upon
the period of decadence, which, when it first commenced,
there was no means of arresting, that we cannot refrain
from looking with greater sorrow than interest. There
was that difference between the First Epoch and the
Last that there is between the flow and the ebb of the
tide ; but here there was no rally, not even among
the political inheritors of the soil on which all these
examples of skill and refinement saw the light. But in
the Greek coinage there is another consideration, of
which the collector becomes sensible, and that is the
liability to unequal work in the money of the same
ruler produced, if not concurrently, at least within a
short interval. The disparity of execution often arises
from the circumstances under which the particular die
was engraved, from the call for an issue of money on
a sudden emergency in a distant province, or in the
absence of skilled operatives ;
and in many of the Greek
series we are able to place side by side two tetra-
drachms, or other pieces of contemporary date, where
the type is identical and the workmanship perceptibly
differs. The same phenomenon occurs in the English
and French coinages ; and that is more usually due to
the employment of a provincial artist, as in the case of
the Oxford twenty-shilling piece of inferior style, and
in some of the copper currency of Henry III. and IV.
of France.
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