Nineteenth Century
In 1813 it was necessary to strike 80,000 guineas to pay the Duke of Wellington's army in the Pyrenees, as the local people would accept only gold in payment. This issue has become known as the Military Guinea. At this time, gold was still scarce and the guinea was trading on the open market for 27 shillings in paper money, so the coining of this issue for the army's special needs was a poor deal for the government, and this was the last issue of guineas to be minted. The reverse of the military guinea is a unique design, showing a crowned shield within a Garter, with on the Garter, and ("King of the British, Defender of the Faith") around the edge, and "1813" between the edge inscription and the garter.
Read more about this topic: Guinea (British Coin)
Famous quotes related to nineteenth century:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell’s major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority, that the nineteenth century is infatuated with was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)