W. C a r e w H a z l i t t Coinage of the European Continent

6 The Coins of Europe
It is
manifestly a good deal more than the part of a
virtuoso or a dilettante to collect this rich assemblage of
unimpeachable memorials around one, and to investigate
them as aids to the formation of a true judgment of the
mighty and restless spirits which have in turn swayed and
shaped the fortunes of the European continent. The great
men and women who are portrayed or named by us in the
pages which succeed, lie, as it were, beneath our feet, dust to
dust, but the records of their lives are in our hands. The
man of letters, the poet, makes himself our contemporary
and the contemporary of all who are to come after us in a
different way we
; study him, converse with him, and measure
him in his books. But the statesman, the legislator, the
soldier, the orator, who lifted himself above his fellows, and
for whom mortality was too frail and too brief, relies on
other witnesses the archive and the chronicle, the medal
and the canvas
;
and how imperfectly the historical personages
of all countries would be realised to us if we were required
to content ourselves, as a rule, with the testimony of the
manuscript or printed page
!
Of the material which has reached our hands for elucidating
and verifying the transactions and occurrences of the
past, the coin and its posterior development, the medal, are
at once the most durable, the most trustworthy, the most
consecutive, and the most universal.
Ill
A survey for the first time of the feudal currencies of
mediaeval Europe is apt to awaken a feeling of dismay
and bewilderment. The distribution of authority, and the
relationship of the Crown to its great vassals, with their
common obligations to the Church, constitute a political life
and a social atmosphere diametrically opposed to prevailship
between the medal and coin. Almost all the fine work in both series in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is traceable to distinguished artists.