New English Coinage.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 174, 16 October 1886, Page 3 (Supplement)

New English Coinage.

There is much discussion in England over the new money tbat is to be issued next year in honor of the Queen's Jubilee, and there are multitudes of suggestions. Ail the coins that have done service for many years are doomed to be melted down and furnish materialsior a new face. The florin is objected to, not only because it clashes with the half-crown, but because the Queen is represented as wearing a diadem that not only droops her head, but looks heavy enough to give any amount of headache. The Queen's crown when she was young and dressed up to the occasion, was always a similar one, and it suited her rather massive countenance much, better than the little close ornaments adopted of late years, which looks like an insignificant top knot, that would slip off at any moment withont notice. And this ifc nearly did in 1874, when she was ascending the throne on the opening of Parliament. Had not the Princeess Beatrice, who was alongside, made a clutch, the crown might have rolled on the floor, an ill omen that no after hair-pinningi, fastenings or tears could wipe away. To a great many English the florin i8 a favourite piece, far preferred to _any mere couple of shillings, and was only surpassed by the Victorian Gothic crown, a gem dear to collectors in its mint state this work of art was condemned as too fine a pieae of workmanship for common use, and the public had to put up with something more calculated to bear fingering and pocketing. In the new coinage the Queen is no more to figure as a girl of eighteen, but is to be arrayed somewhat in the fashion of Queen Catherine Parr by Holbein— the dress black, in ample folds ; the throat seen through the bust is covered and the'hair visible through the close-set-ting, matronly hood, with a knob on the Royal head-dreaa that through the peeresses' opea glasses in the gallery of the House of Lords will turn into some microscopic edition of the Imperial crown.