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

Introduction 1
5
France by the Arabs or Moorish occupiers of Franco-Spanish
territory during a protracted lapse of time.
The tendency of copyists in all
ages has been to
degenerate, as they proceeded, from their originals. Progress
and improvement can only be expected from the exercise of
thought and taste and their judicious adaptation to existing
circumstances ;
and it
may be predicated of almost all the
attempts, even in the best period of Italian art, to reproduce
classical subjects, that they are unfortunate or at least
imperfect. The happiest efforts of the modern moneyer in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were in portraiture,
heraldry, and costume, because he rendered what he saw
before him, and rendered it
admirably, whereas in the
manipulation of fables or objects depicted on Greek work of
the best and purest period by mediaeval artists even of
approved skill and repute, we can discern at most nothing
more than an inferior revival of what had been given to the
world a thousand years before.
Venturing to assume that the fountain of the modern
numismatic revival about the sixth century was somewhere
in Northern Germany or Northern Holland, the writer has
made the former country, including Switzerland, Poland,
Russia, etc., his starting-point, and has allowed the Netherlands
to follow next in order. The precedence accorded
to Germany seemed to render it convenient to trace the
Teutonic influence, so far as it went, and to include in the first
division or group of districts those, such as Russia, Servia,
Bulgaria, where in the first place the Byzantine, and finally
the Western types, prevailed. Although the Swiss subsequently
adopted French models and denominations, their
earliest numismatic culture and sympathy were German,
and the source of the civilisation and refinement of Independent
Poland is to be found in the same direction through
the political relationship of that kingdom at the outset to
the margravate of Brandenburgh and to Prussia. The Muscovite
moneyers received their elementary education when
Moscow became the capital, and the old Greek patterns
fell
out of favour, from the Poles and Hungarians.