This of all the marks should be the most intimate and should indicate the personal touch, as something coming from the craftsman to the possessor. It is the heirloom which the old silversmith hands to posterity. His mark signified his pride in his art, that is in the days when craftsmen were artists and whatsoever their hand found to do they did it with all their might. But the maker’s mark, set on it first by his punch when he duly sent his apprentice to the assay office to have it assayed and marked by the great functionaries of his guild, has become eclipsed beside the imposing array of symbols stamped upon it at the Goldsmiths’ Hall. That the piece exists and was brought into being by the humble silversmith is of lesser importance than the row of legally environed escutcheons signifying so much with such unerring veracity: that it was assayed and found of standard quality, so down comes the stamp of the lion _passant_; that the year was so and so _anno domini_, down comes the stamp of the secret date letter, so carefully guarded from the public; that the duty was paid, and not till then, another stamp, this time with the king’s head; and last but not least, down comes the stamp of the leopard’s head, denoting that all this was done under the surveillance of the Mistery of Goldsmiths of London. Hence the collector, who comes a century or two after these great happenings, by capricious fate casts his lens on the signs manual of standard, and proofs of place and date; but the bare initials of the maker, which came first from the furnace to the assay office, now come last, as insignificant letters merely denoting that the specimen happened to have been made at all.
What would one give for a few human touches in connexion with our old silver! We may imagine that our candlesticks of the year 1750 held the flickering wax candles which were guttering when the dawn broke when our great-great-grandfather lost his fortune at cards in the county of --, or maybe it was somebody else’s grandfather. But this is in the realms of fancy, and the fortune is literally fabulous. Why are there no George Morlands in the silversmith’s craft? Cannot the guilds dig out their romantic history from their archives? Just to think that our designer of candelabra and flagons ran a fine career on Hounslow Heath with gamesters and fighting men; or did he, just that once, have a duel with young Lord What’s-his-Name in the Guards, and pinked him? Did not the story get to White’s and to the Cocoa Tree Clubs, how the tradesman scored! But no such thing. All these initials of makers are empty of such vanities. We can do better with prints. Those who possess the engraved work of Ryland have the satisfaction of knowing that he was hounded by Bow Street runners and hid, like the modern Lefroy, at Stepney, and that he was hanged for forgery.