The old were middle-aged, the elderly were in their prime, then, thirty years since, when yon royal George was still fighting the dragon.  As for you, my pretty lass, with your saucy hat and golden tresses tumbled in your net, and you, my spruce young gentleman in your mandarin’s cap (the young folks at the country-place where I am staying are so attired), your parents were unknown to each other, and wore short frocks and short jackets, at the date of this five-shilling piece.  Only to-day I met a dog-cart crammed with children—­children with moustaches and mandarin caps—­children with saucy hats and hair-nets—­children in short frocks and knickerbockers (surely the prettiest boy’s dress that has appeared these hundred years)—­children from twenty years of age to six; and father, with mother by his side, driving in front—­and on father’s countenance I saw that very laugh which I remember perfectly in the time when this crown-piece was coined—­in his time, in King George’s time, when we were school-boys seated on the same form.  The smile was just as broad, as bright, as jolly, as I remember it in the past—­unforgotten, though not seen or thought of, for how many decades of years, and quite and instantly familiar, though so long out of sight.

Any contemporary of that coin who takes it up and reads the inscription round the laurelled head, “Georgius IV.  Britanniarum Rex.  Fid.  Def. 1823,” if he will but look steadily enough at the round, and utter the proper incantation, I dare say may conjure back his life there.  Look well, my elderly friend, and tell me what you see?  First, I see a Sultan, with hair, beautiful hair, and a crown of laurels round his head, and his name is Georgius Rex.  Fid.  Def., and so on.  Now the Sultan has disappeared; and what is that I see?  A boy,—­a boy in a jacket.  He is at a desk; he has great books before him, Latin and Greek books and dictionaries.  Yes, but behind the great books, which he pretends to read, is a little one, with pictures, which he is really reading.  It is—­yes, I can read now—­it is the “Heart of Mid Lothian,” by the author of “Waverley”—­or, no, it is “Life in London, or the Adventures of Corinthian Tom, Jeremiah Hawthorn, and their friend Bob Logic,” by Pierce Egan; and it has pictures—­oh! such funny pictures!  As he reads, there comes behind the boy, a man, a dervish, in a black gown, like a woman, and a black square cap, and he has a book in each hand, and he seizes the boy who is reading the picture-book, and lays his head upon one of his books, and smacks it with the other.  The boy makes faces, and so that picture disappears.