And, accordingly, the clever rogues of that day soon discovered that it was far easier for them to take up a pair of shears and to clip a sliver of silver off the rough rim of a shilling, or a shaving of gold off a sovereign, than it was to take of their coats and work a hard day’s work.  Till to clip the coin of the realm soon became one of the easiest and most profitable kinds of crime.  In the time of Elizabeth a great improvement was made in the way of coining the public money; but it was soon found that this had only made matters worse.  For now, side by side with a pure and unimpaired and full-valued currency, and mingled up everywhere with it, there was the old, clipped, debased, and far too light gold and silver money; till troubles arose in connection with the coinage and circulation of the country that can only be told by Macaulay’s extraordinarily graphic pen.  ’It may well be doubted,’ Macaulay says, in the twenty-first chapter of his History of England, ’whether all the misery which has been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad Parliaments, and bad Judges was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings.  Whether Whigs or Tories, Protestants or Papists were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to market, the grocer weighed out his currants, the draper measured out his broadcloth, the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the towns; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice foamed in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in the furnaces of the Trent, and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the timber railways of the Tyne.  But when the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged all trade and all industry were smitten as with a palsy.  Nothing could be purchased without a dispute.  Over every counter there was wrangling from morning to night.  The employer and his workmen had a quarrel as regularly as Saturday night came round.  On a fair day or a market day the clamours, the disputes, the reproaches, the taunts, the curses, were incessant.  No merchant would contract to deliver goods without making some stipulation about the quality of the coin in which he was to be paid.  The price of the necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast.  The bit of metal called a shilling the labourer found would not go so far as sixpence.  One day Tonson sends forty brass shillings to Dryden, to say nothing of clipped money.  The great poet sends them all back and demands in their place good guineas.  “I expect,” he says, “good silver, not such as I had formerly.”  Meanwhile, at every session of the Old Bailey the most terrible example of coiners and clippers was made.  Hurdles, with four, five, six wretches convicted of counterfeiting or mutilating the money of the realm, were dragged month after month up Holborn Hill.’  But I cannot copy the whole chapter, wonderful as the