Silver by Abraham Portal, an apprentice to Paul de Lamerie, is rare as Portal abandoned full-time goldsmithing for playwriting and other literary endeavors in the 1750s. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Portal lost money as a silversmith, then as a bookseller, and ended his career as a box-keeper at the Drury Lane Theater. His known writings are: Olinda and Sophronia: A Tragedy of 1758, The Indiscreet Lover: A Comedy of 1768, Songs, Duets, and Finale, from a comic opera of 1778, Poems of 1781, and Vortimer, or the True Patriot: A Tragedy of 1769. Portal's plays received mixed reviews, and the introduction to his first tragedy includes the following apology: "the Author . . . has been educated, and hitherto passed Time, not in the learned and peaceful Retreats of the Muses, but in the rude and noisy Shop of Vulcan, his Performance is but the Effort of almost unassisted Nature: the Solace and Amusement of leisure Hours."