Joseph Hertzog was born at a time when the spirit of romanticism was displacing the cold, calculating aura of the eighteenth century; when Schiller and Goethe, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Poe and Whittier, impelled by their love for the homelier things of life, wrote eloquently to the heart of man; when the Ohio yielded place to the Mississippi as a western boundary; when the pioneers were pushing the frontiers farther and farther westward and giving our country that dauntless courage, that sturdy honesty, and that democratic spirit which we should like to consider synonymous with “Americanism” today. With his poetic soul, clear vision, and faith in his country, Hertzog contributed to the progress that marked his epoch and gave to posterity an example of sterling qualities that never wavered in the face of disappointment, ill treatment, and even failure to realize the ambitions he hoped to reach.

Probably most Americans who read Dumas' immortal Three Musketeers and its sequels have no clear idea of the coins in question when the great novelist writes of pistoles and louis d'or. And though the louis d'or was coined for only about a century and a half, it has left, thanks to a fortunate combination of circumstances, a lasting mark in history.