Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/120

106 for several months. It is somewhat remarkable that, with all his nice perceptions of taste, he paid, voluntarily or involuntarily, the old hereditary English homage to SOLIDITY. He gave a Spartan size and weight to his coppers that vied well with the iron currency of Lycurgus. His penny weighed just an ounce, and his twopenny piece two ounces. Eight of the latter and sixteen of the former made just a pound. A sovereign's value in them made a comfortable load of fifteen pounds for a pair of saddle-bags. But their inconvenience as currency was compensated in other uses to which they might be turned. They were not only the most exact but the only uniform weights in the kingdom, and could be used more safely for the purchaser than any others in weighing out tea, snuff, tobacco, and even small family purchases of butter and cheese. Boulton fancied he had produced a coinage by his nice machinery which could not be imitated; but it was, in a few years, by lead pennies faced with copper. But if hypocrisy be a compliment to virtue, these counterfeits were almost a virtuous suggestion to truth. One might be tempted to believe that virtuous people acquiesced in the suggestion, especially if they had ever carried a shilling's worth of Boulton's pennies in their pockets up two flights of stairs, or a mile of level road. Whereas the genuine article was sixteen