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

the lowest depths ^ve cry unto Tkee y
O
Introduction 3 7
Lord / Others point a
similar moral, but are more restrained, as Jure et Tempore,
Pro Rcge et Patrid, Hcec Libertatis ergo. We can afford
the Italians and Sicilians themselves can afford to smile,
when they take up an old piece of the Bourbons with Publica
Felicitas or Securitas Publica ; a copper coin of the Two
Sicilies (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) is even termed
a publica ; we read on some of the reverses of the currency
of the Knights of Malta, Non ^s, sed Fides ; and a favourite
sentence is Cliristo Auspice Regno. On a piece of Philip II.
struck for the Low Countries about 1585, we meet with
such sentences as Hilaritas universa and Pace et Justitia}
The interesting variety of the Netherlandish 2
oort and Hard
with the reading on the reverse -Avx. Nos in Nom. Dom. was,
like the majority of political
movements, a gradual evolution.
The original pieces, of which there is a tolerably long and
regular series, bore on the obverse a portrait of Philip II.
and his title as King of Spain, and on the other side a
shield of arms with the remainder of his honours. The first
revolutionary step was to substitute, in 15/7, for the royal
bust the kneeling or seated figure of a man within a hedge
beckoning for assistance, and the supplicatory reading abovementioned
;
the next replaced the shield with the name of
the province issuing the money and at ; length we find the
in his
figure removed to make room for the lion grasping
claw the staff surmounted by the bonnet. Such is the
numismatic story in little of a noble, prolonged, and patient
struggle for freedom. Apart from the protest and assertion
which these changes conveyed, the employment of the coinage
as a political vehicle helped to educate the popular eye and
thought in
It is
the new doctrines of self-government.
for their multifarious interest and value in preserving
for the consideration and sympathy of later, and the latest,
ages fugitive though acute and profound exigencies, that
1
Some instructive particulars under this head may be found in Armand,
" Tables de Legendes " apud his Medailleurs Italiens, 1883-87.
2 Two specimens before us, lent by Mr. W. Stampa Lambert, are dated
respectively 1577 and 1578, and give the titles of Philip as Count of Holland
and Zeeland.