The amusement arising from medals is so common and universal that we meet with few people who have not formed a little collection of some kind or another. As no axiom is looked upon as more certain than that even the minutest principles of the human mind have been the same in all ages, we must be induced to suppose that the study of medals is almost as ancient as medals themselves. . .

The principal and most common source of pleasure arising from the science of medals is their workmanship. The motives of delight which owe their origin to the other efforts of imitative art will here likewise of course predominate. A philosophic inquiry into the prime causes of our pleasures arising from art, though it would make an admirable subject for a treatise. . .

Not to enter then into that profound subject, this we know, that the most barbarous nations are more pleased with the rudest efforts of art than with the most admirable works of nature; and that, in proportion to the powers of the mind that are large and various, such, likewise, are the pleasures which it receives from those superlative productions of art, which can only be the offspring of vast genius. It follows that the creation of art alike pleases the most uninformed and the most cultivated mind.