Mahafky — The Post-Assaying on Dated Plate in T. 0. D. 37 



Powerscourt House 1 to copy the twenty years older stucco-work of the gr< mini- 

 floor rooms, they would at once have answered that such decoration was now 

 antiquated and out of fashion. Very likely they despised it. We might as 

 well now ask a lady to dress in the fashions of thirty years ago. In an 

 artistic and productive age these changes are very rapid. The decorators of 

 the Theatre in Trinity College, designed in 1775 by Stapleton, who was 

 working under Adam influence, would not for a moment have thought 

 of copying the decoration of the Provost's House, carried out next door in 

 1760. Unless, therefore, I could find explicit evidence that the silversmiths 

 of 1750-90 were ordered by the College to reproduce the old dated gifts in 

 form and style, I still maintain that when this style is confessedly archaic, 

 and the date of gift clearly set upon any article, we have the original thing, 

 in spite of the grave difficulty of the Hibernia, which it is the main object of 

 this paper to solve. How great the difficulty was, I did not appreciate till I. 

 had gone a long way into this inquiry. 



When studying parallel cases in Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, I came 

 upon this passage in Provost Shadwell's Ptegister of Oriel (i, p. xij : " It was 

 the frequent practice to sell or exchange pieces of plate worn out, or no 

 longer in fashion . . . Even between 1600 and 16-40 many pieces had been 

 parted with in this way. All but a very few have been replaced by more 

 modern articles, though the inscriptions have been in most cases carefully 

 transferred." Among the old papers in our Muniments Room I had seen long 

 ago two pages dealing with plate, and had not understood their meaning. 

 Quite recently, after long search, I found them again, and they throw a curious 

 light upon the history of our plate. From these pages, which contain 

 but a part of the transaction, it appears that the College, becoming rich in 

 the course of the eighteenth century, determined, at a date which we can fix 

 with much probability at 1731-2, to have at least 900 oz. of their older cups 

 (of which they had a multitude) melted clown and turned into articles useful 

 for the College dinner-table. They were beginning to entertain the Viceroy 

 and other grandees more and more handsomely, and wanted useful silver plate 

 to adorn the table. Hence they had older cups turned into knives, forks, 

 salvers, candlesticks, preserving, however, the donors' names and dates in an 

 abbreviated form, which is given in the list in each case on the right hand of 

 the coat of arms. We still have a considerable number of the newer objects 

 so acquired, with the inscriptions on them then added; and as the latest <<( 

 these melted-down gifts dates from 1730, there is no reason, so tar as all 

 these are concerned, why the Hibernia should not naturally appear on them, 



'The details are to be found in vol. ii of the Georgian Society's volumes. 



