local shopkeepers and bankers defied the law and again began to issue their own coins.  I have in my possession what looks like a George III. shilling, with the King’s head on one side and, on the other, inside a wreath of shamrocks, the inscription:  “Bank Token, 10 Pence Irish, 1813.”  It was turned up by the plough on a Staffordshire farm a few years ago.  Speaking of this reminds me that a separate Irish coinage continued even after the Union of 1800.  It was not till 1817 that English gold and silver became current in Ireland, and Irish pennies and halfpennies were struck as late as the reign of George IV.  The Scottish coins came to an end more than a century earlier.  The name of one of them, however, the “bawbee,” has survived in popular humour.  Some people say that the name is merely a corruption of “baby,” referring to the portrait of Queen Mary as an infant.  It seems to me as unlikely a derivation as could be imagined.

Of all the English coins, the first appearance of which occasioned popular anger, none had a worse reception than the two-shilling piece which appeared in 1849.  “This piece,” says Miss G.B.  Rawlings in Coins and How to Know Them, a book rich in information, “was unfavourably received, owing to the omission of ‘Dei Gratia’ after the Queen’s name, and was stigmatised as the godless or graceless florin.”  The florin, however, so called after a Florentine coin, had come to stay, but since 1851 it has been as godly in inscription as any of the other money in one’s pocket.  The coin has survived, but hardly the name.  One can with an effort call a spade a spade, but who would think of calling a florin a florin?  The coin itself for a time bore the inscription:  “One Florin, Two Shillings,” as though the name called for translation.  Since the introduction of the florin, there have been many coins that aroused popular hatred.  The four-shilling piece, especially, that was struck in the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, was received with a howl of execration.  Men went about in constant dread of argument with shopkeepers as to whether they had given them a four-shilling or a five-shilling piece.  In the interests of the national good temper the coin ceased to be struck after 1890 Englishmen, however, disliked the entire Jubilee coinage.  They disliked the Queen’s portrait, and they disliked especially a sixpence which could be easily gilded to look like a half-sovereign.  The sixpences were hurriedly withdrawn, but schoolboys continued to treasure them in the belief that they were worth fabulous sums.  Like groats, the delight of one’s childhood, they began to be desirable as soon as they ceased to be common.  When King Edward VII. came to the throne, there was another outburst of hatred of new money.  The chief objection to it was that the King’s effigy had been designed by a German and had not even been designed well.  It was at this time, perhaps, when people began to hate the money in their pockets, that the reign of modern extravagance began.  To get rid of a sovereign bearing a design by Herr Fuchs seemed a patriotic duty.  Thrift and pro-Germanism were indistinguishable.