CHAPTER I. GENERAL VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE Notices of the Life of Joseph PLANTA, third Principal- Chap. I. HITHERTO these pages have chiefly had to do with the BOOK III, history of the integral parts of the British Museum, and HISTORY with that of the men by whom these integral parts, taken MUSEUM severally, were first founded or first gathered. We have UNDER OF THE MR. PLANTA. BOOK III, OF THE UNDER now to glance at the organic history of the whole, after the primary Collections and the early additions to them came, by aggregation, to be combined into the existing national establishment. It may, at best, be only by glances that so wide a subject can (within the limits of this one volume) be looked over, in retrospect. That necessity of being brief suggests a connection of the successive epochs in the story of the Museum, for seventy years, with the lives of the three eminent men who have successively presided over the institution since the beginning of the present century. Those three official lives, I think, will be found to afford succinct divisions or breakings of the subject, as well as to possess a distinctive personal interest of their own. Our introductory chapters will therefore-in relation to the chapters which follow them-be, in part, retrospective, and, in part, prospective. When Dr. Charles MORTON died (10 February, 1799), Joseph PLANTA was, by the three principal Trustees, appointed to be his successor. The choice soon commended itself to the Public by the introduction of some important the respect of Englishmen by his literary attainments. He Joseph PLANTA was of Swiss parentage. He was of a Chap. I. OF THE MR. PLANTA, JOSEPH THIRD race and family which had given to Switzerland several BOOK III, worthies who have left a mark in its national history. He HISTORY was born, on the twenty-first of February, 1744, at Casta- MUSEUM segna, where his father was the pastor of a reformed church. UNDER The boy left Switzerland before he had completed the second year of his age. He began his education at Utrecht, LIFE OF and continued it, first at the University of Göttingen, and PLANTA, afterwards by foreign travel—whilst yet open to the forma- PRINCIPAL tive influences of youthful experience upon character-both LIBRARIAN. in France and in Italy. It was thus his fortune to combine what there is of good in the characteristics of the cosmopolite with what is better in those of a patriotic son of the soil. It was Joseph PLANTA's fortune never to live in Switzerland, as a resident, after the days of early infancy, but, for all that, he remained a true Swiss. And one of the acts of his closing years in England was to make a most creditable contribution to Helvetic history. Andrew PLANTA, father of Joseph, came to London in 1752. He was a man of good parts and of pleasing address. He established himself as pastor of a German congregation, and was also made an Assistant-Librarian in the British Museum. Afterwards, he was chosen to be a Fellow of the Royal Society and a reader' to Queen CHARLOTTE. That appointment brought with it, in course of time, a measure of Court influence by which young PLANTA profited. His youthful Wanderjahre' had inspired the growing man with a keen desire to see more of foreign countries. When the father's favour at Court put him in a position to represent at head-quarters the youth's fancy to see life abroad, and to state (as he truthfully could) that neither talent nor industry were lacking in his character, the statement obtained for Joseph PLANTA the secretaryship of legation at Brussels. There, he felt himself BOOK III, OF THE UNDER MR. PLANTA. vol. lxvi, pp. 129-160. to be in an element which suited him; but his filial affection brought him back to England in 1773, in order that he might solace the last days, on earth, of his father. In that year the elder PLANTA died. It was also in 1773 that Joseph PLANTA became an Assistant-Librarian. In the next year he was appointed to succeed Dr. MATY in both of his then offices. At the Royal Society he succeeded him as Secretary; at the Museum, he succeeded him as an Under-Librarian-when the Doctor was made head of the establishment. His new post at the Museum brought to PLANTA the special charge of the Department of MSS. Joseph PLANTA had already made-immediately after his first appointment as Assistant-Librarian-his outset in Phil. Trans., authorship by the publication of his Account of the Romansch Language. It is a scholarly production, though (it need hardly be said) not what would be expected, on such a subject, after the immense stride made in linguistical studies during the ninety-five years which have elapsed since it was given to literature, in pages in which nowadays such a treatise would hardly be looked for. Its first appearance was in the Philosophical Transactions. In 1776 it was translated into German and printed at Chamouni. The subsequent years were devoted, almost exclusively, to the proper duties of his Museum office on the days of service and to those of the Paymastership of Exchequer Bills, a function to which Mr. PLANTA was appointed in 1788, and the duties of which he discharged, with efficiency and honour, for twenty-three years. Authorship had but little of his time until a much later period of life. A little before his appointment in the administrative service of the country, PLANTA had married Miss Elizabeth ATWOOD. For him, marriage did just the opposite of what Chap. I. OF THE MUSEUM UNDER it has, now and then, been said to do for some other men. BOOK III, It took off the edge of his liking for foreign travel. For HISTORY it gave him a very happy home. Their union endured for twenty-four years. PLANTA was not a man of the gushing MR. PLANTA. sort. But, to intimates, he would say-in the lonely years; Falkenstein, there were to be but few of them-She was an angel Zeitgenossen, in spirit and in heart.' Mrs. PLANTA died in 1821. On the death of Charles MORTON, Mr. PLANTA, as we have seen already, was made Principal Librarian. He found the Museum still in its infancy, although no less than forty-six years had passed since the bequest of Sir Hans SLOANE was made to the British Public, and more than forty years since that Public had entered upon its inheritance. The collections had kept pace with the growth of science only in one or two departments. In others the arrear was enormous. The accessibility was hampered with restrictions. The building was in pressing need of enlargement, gradual as had been the growth of some sections, and glaring as was the deficiency of other sections. PLANTA put his shoulders to the wheel, and met with support and encouragement from several of the Trustees. But the feeling still ran strongly against any approach to indiscriminate publicity in any department of the Museum. Men did not carry that restrictive view quite so far in 1800, as it had been expressed by Dr. John WARD -an able and good man-in 1760, and earlier; but they still looked with apprehension upon the combined ideas of a crowd of visitors, and irreplaceable treasures of learning and of art. A good many of the men of 1800 possessed, it must in candour be remembered, living recollections of the sights and the deeds of 1780. Residents in Bloomsbury were likely, on that score, to have particularly good &c., Dritte Reihe, Bd. ii, pp. 3, seqq. |