'Mr Collins ... shewed me a copper Otho, formed, as I verily believe, out of a middle brass of NERO, with SECVRITAS on the reverse, valued at forty pounds; and one Mr Houghton, of St Edmunds, in these parts of Holland, since then shewed me a Paduan in great brass, Rev. an Adlocutio Militum, a good deal worn, but pretended to be found in an old ruinous grange called Monksdoles ... and valued by him at much money. You see, Sir, how curiosity in the medallick way is strangely alive amongst people who see and know as little of this sort of money as any in England.
The former of these belongs to poor Mr Charles Little of Boston, an illiterate coffee-house-keeper, who has begged and bought up as strange a farrago of a collection as ever was beheld. The latter, I am persuaded, was pawned by some traveller, and is gone to see if Mr Beaupré Bell, or Mr Snell, rector of Doddington in the Isle of Ely will give a good price for it.
I believe cousin Bell knows better; he has lately purchased a ollection of about 500 Greek and Roman coins, brought from abroad, by the late Mr Hanson, lecturer of Wisbech, a great traveller, and possessed also of many natural curiosities, which he picked up in the East Indies, and most parts of Europe and Asia, besides a large collection of portraits on copper plates.
Mr Bell has been so ill as to be prevented going to Cambridge, where he was before Christmas, and proposed to have returned ere this, to have finished the printing of his Tabulae Augustae; and I find, there is some doubt whether he will live to see it out, he is so very much declined in health, and complains of the mistakes and negligence of Kirkhall the engraver, who, being at London, and not pursuing his draughts and dirctions, puts him to great difficulties to rectify his errors at so great a distance, in so nice works as the outlines of portraits from coins, and the legends round them, a work only fitt for an Aenea Vico, or such an engraver. I could have wished, as Mr Bell draws accurately himself, that he would rather have etched them with his own hand, than trusted the doing them to any one not a scholar and well acquainted with the features of of the princes to be represented.'
(Nichols 1781-1790, pp. 344-6; Lukis 1882-1887, vol. 2, pp. 280-2; Burnett 2020b, p. 1661)
