trust for posterity and for GOD frittered away by paltry expedients and controlled by Parliament; tithes alienated, Church estates sold, and real property transmuted into Consols; the Church's right to elect bishops yielded to a Shaftesbury; annual guineas ostentatiously substituted at Exeter Hall for broad acres and solemn oblations on the Christian Altar; the fabric of our ancient parochial churches endangered, and their prescriptive title to maintenance from the land denied? And this is PROGRESS! When we think of these things, can we be surprised at nonconformity, or at "the fierce and brutal infidelity" (to use Lord Shaftesbury's language) which prevails in every part of the country? The "Provincial Physician" says the remedy is to be found in revising the Book of Common Prayer. Lord Shaftesbury seeks it by an equally insidious measure for the gradual abrogation of the Liturgy and encouragement of speculation in pew-rents, by legalising preaching-places in every parish in opposition to the clergy, to the subversion of the parochial system, and the great danger of the Liturgy, the Prayer Book, and the Church of England itself. And we are coolly told by the Evangelical and Erastian party, that, in order to resist that stedfast ancient Church of Rome which has rejected all Lutheran and Calvinistic heresies, we must unite with Dissenters and agree that the Church of England shall now renounce what she has preserved and guarded of the Catholic faith. GOD forbid it! THE NORTHUMBERLAND CABINET OF ROMAN FAMILY COINS. ["Durham County Advertiser," Oct. 1856.] OUR public libraries and the libraries of literary institutions, as well as the collections of several favoured individuals, have lately been enriched by a work entitled "Descriptive Catalogue of a Cabinet of Roman Family Coins belonging to His Grace the Duke of Northumberland, K.G.; by Rear-Admiral William Henry Smyth," &c., which, although bearing on the title-page the words "printed for private circulation," is a volume of so much importance and value as to render it fitting that its production and contents should be publicly noticed. His Grace Algernon Duke of Northumberland is well known to have been a zealous and inquiring traveller; and of the exercise, during his travels, of his taste for the higher departments of archæology the duke's splendid collections of Egyptian and other antiquities bear witness; while the cabinets of the Numismatic and of some Antiquarian Societies have been enriched by His Grace's gift of collections of ancient Greek and other coins, acquired by himself in his travels on the historic shores of the Mediterranean. The duke's learned and gallant friend Admiral Smyth appears to have suggested that the several cabinets of coins and medals in His Grace's possession should be examined and arranged, and this congenial labour the admiral undertook. In retaining the Northumberland Cabinet of Coins of the Roman Families, the special object which the duke had in view was to have a complete work printed on that subject in English, such a work having been wanted in our libraries; and the goodly quarto above referred to is the result. An early admiration for classical antiquity, followed by a long official employment in the Mediterranean, have well qualified Admiral Smyth for his scientific work. Scholar and sailor, geographer and geologist, antiquary and astronomer, his acquirements are various, and the animation and humour with which he writes, pleasantly set off the dryness of numismatic detail, and blend amusement with instruction. Accordingly, in the handsome volume, for which its possessors are indebted to the liberality and courtesy of the noble duke and the scholarship and labour of the gallant admiral, we have-not merely the desiderated catalogue of the Roman consular and family coins in His Grace's collection, but-a work over which are scattered the sparks of much classical learning. Coins and medals are stores gleaned from the debris of Time, which, when polished by the true antiquary, become useful to the poet, the geographer, the artist, the biographer, the chronologist, and the historian; and this is truly a work full of elucidations of history, chronology, and geography, as well as of the constitutional divisions and usages of the Roman people. Having said thus much of the book, it may be interesting to some of our readers that we should subjoin a few particulars illustrative of the Roman coinage-that coinage which for nearly four centuries constituted the only circulating medium in this country-in the then distant "ultimos orbis Britannos," the Britain which, though Once despised, can raise As ample sums as Rome in Cæsar's days; Pour forth as numerous legions on the plain, The Romans commenced their coinage with brass, or rather bronze, in the time of king Servius Tullius, nearly 600 years before Christ. Silver followed about the year B.C. 267, in the 485th year of the city, and sixty-two years afterwards the Romans minted gold. About a hundred and twenty-eight varieties in gold, two thousand four hundred in silver, and nearly three hundred in bronze are known. In the Roman coinage there is a well-known and extensive silver-series ranging through many hundred years, and nearly to the period of the fall of the Eastern Empire. This series is subdivided into the three classes of the consular, the family, and the imperial denarii. The first two of these classes form the staple of the present catalogue, those coins being designated "consular" which were struck during the Republic with the authority of the Consuls; and those specimens being included under the denomination of "Family Coins" which are inscribed with the name of any Roman family. These were struck for the most part between the year B.C. 280 and A.D. 50. Many belong to the time of Julius Cæsar-before whose days no living Roman was permitted to place his effigy upon coins; but the most interesting are nearly of the time of Augustus,—of Augustus who became master of the world about thirty years before Christ, and whose age was esteemed the halcyon day of arts, of letters, and philosophy, although the mighty Emperor (as Mons. Perrault has reminded us) had neither any glass to his windows nor any linen to wear. On all this series of coinage we find, indeed, little chronological certainty, but a wondrous variety of names and attributes, both human and divine-sacred rites and implements-public monuments and edifices- manners and customs, and allusions to honours, triumphs, and other historical events. Thus (for example) on a coin of Pompey the younger, a turret-crowned female figure who meets a warrior stepping from a Prætorian galley, represents Spain welcoming the arrival of Pompey; silver coins of the Emilian family, probably struck about the year B.C. 90, refer to the construction, by Manlius Æmilius Lepidus, of a stone bridge over the Tiber, instead of the wooden bridge of Ancus Martius; others of the same family indicate the joy of the Romans on the capture of the last ruler of Macedon; a Cæcilian coin, having on the reverse a Macedonian shield within a garland, in honour of Metellus, in the centre of which is an elephant's head, alludes to the victory over the Carthaginians in the year B.C. 251; a coin of the great Marcellus of the Claudian gens alludes to the conquest. of Syracuse in the year 212 B.C.; a coin of Lutalius Cerco alludes to the decisive naval victory over Hanno in 241 B.C., which resulted in the peace that closed the first Punic war; a denarius of Pompey the great was probably struck when, in the year B.C. 67, he took the command of the vast armament against the Pirates of the Mediterranean; and other coins recal persons and events commemorated in the orations of Cicero and the poetry of Virgil. It would be curious if the figures of divinities were impressed on the coins to deter rogues from cheating. They certainly had plenty of visible monitors to remind them of their moral and religious obligations, for the Roman citizen, in whatever direction he looked, might "see the countenances of his country's gods bent down upon him" from the temples that rose on every hill. The love of ancestry seems to have been ardent with the best Romans; and no adept in the College of Arms could be more obliging than their sycophantic genealogists. About the time of Sylla, the great families used their own types in commemorating on coins the virtues and glories of their race, or honouring the deities who were their household gods, or public benefactors. Under the Empire, however, the coinage became chiefly regulated by adulation and servility, and the metal, moreover, became as debased as the sentiment of the legend. The coins which have come under the discriminating care of Admiral Smyth afford important aid in tracing individuals to their original patrician or old plebeian stock. Of the one hundred and sixty families whose coins are treated of in this sumptuous volume, fourteen were pure patrician, twenty-six patrician with plebeian branches, seven equestrian, ninety-one plebeian, and twenty-two of uncertain rank and order. The whole cabinet bears seven hundred and sixty-eight specimens, and most of them appear to be in the finest possible state of preservation. In these enduring medals of history-coins that were perhaps actually handled by the very men they commemorate-that passed from hand to hand in the places of public assembly and the sumptuous palaces now mingled with "an Empire's dust" -Rome's glories seem to shine: Her gods and god-like heroes rise to view, |