Excerpt from Roman Coins: Elementary Manual

When, tired of work, weary of society, worried by business, the collector withdraws into his own room; he finds there the most pleasant rest in his favourite occupation which he prefers to idleness. Never is the collector short of employment, to whatever kind of collection he may be given.

First there is the work of arrangement which is infinite, then of classification, and again of cataloguing, and last of all the more serious but yet most delightful work, the most useful and durable (when one reaches it) that of study and of making notes for others, with a view to publishing in due season the results of one's own researches.

The enthusiasm of the Collector is among the most reasonable, strong and lasting emotions. Sir Henry Holland, the friend of Marco Minghetti, towards the close of his long life regretted that he had not been a collector from his youth, expressing his thoughts in these words The interest of a collector grows with continual increase and brings satisfaction, and there is no danger lest it should cease through satiety; very often it survives when the tumultuous vicissitudes of life, stirring business affairs or pleasures have ceased to exist. He who is not a collector in his youth will repent in his old age. Just as the unmarried man feels in his old age the want of a good wife who renders him in the last days of his life the comfort of affection and of old memories, so he who was not a collector in his youth cannot experience in his old age the satisfaction of reviving the memories of a life-time among these old and faithful friends, or of having this infinite and unspeakable comfort to aecom any him even to the extreme limit of his life. And in this also t e collector has the advantage over the married man whose wife may die before he does, whilst the collection always survives the collector.

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