The medallists are not confined to the home market; France has been supplied with effigies of her rival Presidents, Louis Napoleon and Cavaignac, and we should not be surprised to find that some day a contract has been taken for the medals which the Pope blesses and distributes.  Schools and Temperance Societies are good customers, and occasionally a good order comes in from a foreign state or colony, for coins.  In 1850 Mr. Ralph Heaton made ten tons of copper coin for Bombay, called cock money, so called because bearing a cock on the obverse, from dies purchased at the sale at Soho.

The late Sir Richard Thomason was a considerable manufacturer of medals, and a very curious collection may be seen at the showrooms of his successor, Mr. G. R. Collis, who carries on the same trade, and is consul for a number of countries between Turkey and Timbuctoo.

The most important part of the die-sinking trade, is that for making patterns in brass, mixed metal, and iron in curtain bands, pins, lamp pillars, cornices, coffin furniture, and all articles in which stamping has superseded the more expensive process of hammering out.

Within the last twenty years, and notably within the last ten years, public taste has required an increased amount of ornament in all domestic manufactures; stimulated by this demand, great improvements have been made in stamping, and excellence in the art of die-sinking has become more widely diffused.  The Birmingham die-sinkers admit that they are inferior to the French in design, while in the execution of cutting heavy steel dies, they are decidedly superior.  Die-sinking is an art, like painting or sculpture, which requires personal aptitude to enable an apprentice to acquire excellence.

It is carried on in Birmingham by men who work themselves, employing two or three journeymen.  The names of these artists seldom appear.  A London or Parisian tradesman undertakes an order which is passed to some noted Birmingham House, which transmits it to a hard-handed man in a back street.

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Coffin ornaments.—­The manufacture of ornaments for coffins is a very important part of the trade, and it is curious to find, that even in this last concession to human vanity, there is a constant demand for new designs.

Who is it that examines and compares the ornaments of one coffin with that of another?  We never heard of the survivors of a deceased examining an undertaker’s patterns.  And yet, a house which consumes forty tons of cast iron per annum for coffin handles, stated to the gentleman to whose letters we are indebted for this information, “Our travellers find it useless to show themselves with their pattern books at an undertaker’s, unless they have something tasteful, new, and uncommon.  The orders for Ireland are chiefly for gilt furniture for coffins.  The Scotch, also, are fond of gilt, and so are the people in the west of England.  But the taste of the English is decidedly for black.  The Welsh like a mixture of black and white.  Coffin lace is formed of very light stamped metal, and is made of almost as many patterns as the ribbons of Coventry.  All our designs are registered, as there is a constant piracy going on, which it is necessary to check.”