it Chap. I. MUSEUM UNDER an angel Zeitgenossen, &c., Dritte Reihe, Bd. ii, pp. 3, seqq. 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 gave him a very happy home. Their union endured for OF THE 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 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 BOOK III, OF THE UNDER MR. PLANTA. IMPROVE MENTS IN- MENDED, BY THE INTERNAL ECONOMY OF THE MUSEUM. HIS RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE ENLARGE MENT OF THE TIONS. memories. They had seen with their eyes precious manuscripts, which treasured up the lifelong lore of a MANnsfield, given by the populace to the flames. Under the influence of such memories as these, Mr. PLANTA had to propose abolition of restrictions, with a gentle and very gradual hand. He began by improving the practice, without at first greatly altering the rules. By and by he brought, from time to time, before the Trust, suggestions for relaxations in the rules themselves. From the outset he administered the Reading Room itself with much liberality. When he became Principal Librarian the yearly admissions were much under two hundred. In 1816, they had increased to two hundred and ninety-two. In 1820, to five hundred and fifteen. As respects the Department of Antiquities, the students admitted to draw were in 1809 less than twenty; in 1818 two hundred and twenty-three were admitted. In 1814 he recommended the Trustees to make provision for the exhibition every Thursday, to persons applying to see them,' the Engravings and Prints;-the persons admitted not exceeding six at any one time, and others being admitted in due succession. He also recommended a somewhat similar system of exhibition for adoption in the Department of Coins and Medals. And the Trustees gave effect to both recommendations. Eventually Mr. PLANTA proposed, for the general show Collections of the Museum, a system of entirely free admission at the instant of application, abolishing all the hamper of preliminary forms. It was also, I believe, at Mr. PLANTA'S instance, or partly so, that the Trustees applied to Parliament, in 1812, for special grants to enable them to improve the Collection of Printed Books, with reference more particularly to the endeavour to perfect the National Library in the National Chap. I. OF THE MUSEUM MR. PLANTA. History to that very limited extent to which the monu- Book III, ments and memorials of our history are to be found in HISTORY print. Virtually, the grants on behalf of the Manuscript Department, not those on behalf of the Printed Book UNDER Department, were, in 1812, as they still are in 1870, the grants which mainly tend to make the British Museum what, most obviously, it ought to become, the main storehouse of British History and Archæology, both in literature and in art. The magnificent additions made by private donors to every section of the British Museum during the administration of PLANTA, have been sufficiently passed under review in the closing chapters of Book II. Several of them, it has been seen, were the fruits of the public spirit of individual Trustees. Such gifts amply vindicated the wisdom both of Sir Hans SLOANE and of Parliament, when both Founder and Legislature gave to men of exalted position a preference as peculiarly fit, in the judgment of each, for the general guardianship of the Museum. HIS CATHO LICITY OF SYMPATHIES. But private gifts-munificent as they were left large gaps in the National Collections. It is one of Mr. PLANTA'S TASTES AND distinctive merits that his tastes and sympathies embraced the Natural History Department, as well as those literary departments with which, as a man of letters, he had a more direct personal connection. He supported, with his influence, the wise recommendation to Parliament-made in 1810-for the purchase of the GREVILLE Collection of Minerals. He recommended, in 1822, the purchase, from the representatives of the naturalist MONTICELLI, of a like, though minor Collection, which had been formed at Naples. The Cavaliero MONTICELLI'S Collection was, in the main, one that had been undertaken in imitation of an earlier assemblage of volcanic products which had been also gathered at BOOK III, Chap. I. HISTORY OF THE MUSEUM UNDER MR. PLANTA. Naples by Sir William HAMILTON, and by the Collector given (as I have already recorded) to the Trustees. In a similar spirit he promoted the acquisitions which were made from time to time, by the instrumentality of Claudius RICH, of Henry SALT, and of several other workers in the fruitful field of Classical, Assyrian, and Egyptian archæological exploration. Both in the literary and scientific departments of the Museum he also gave some special attention to the due continuance and completion of the various collections bestowed on the Public by the munificence of Sir Joseph BANKS. Another conspicuous merit belongs to Joseph Planta. He supported the Trustees in that wise and large-minded policy which induced them to regard publication, as well as accumulation, to be one of the chief duties of their Trust for the Nation. He thought it not enough, for example, to show to groups of Londoners, from time to time, and to occasional foreign visitants, in almost solitary state, the wealth of Nature and of Art in the Museum Collections. He saw it to be no less the duty of the faithful trustees of such treasures to show them to the world at large by the combined labours of the painter, the draughtsman, the engraver, and the printer. It will ever be an honourable distinction-in the LABOURS ON briefest record of his Museum labours-that he promoted the publication of the beautiful volumes entitled Description of the Ancient Marbles in the British Museum; of the Catalogue of the Anglo-Gallic Coins; of the Mausoleum and Cinerary Urns; of the Description of Terra Cottas; and other like works. The first-named work in particular is an especial honour to the Trustees of the Museum, and to all who were concerned in its production. Beautifully engraved, and ably edited, it made the archæological treasures of the Nation widely known even to such foreigners, PLANTA'S THE MUSEUM'S Chap. I. OF THE MUSEUM MR. PLANTA. interested in the study of antiquity, as circumstances pre- BOOK III, cluded from ever seeing the marbles themselves. When HISTORY watching—in the bygone years—the late Henry CORBOULD busy at the work into which he threw so much of his love, UNDER as well as of his skill in drawing, I have been tempted, now and then, to envy the craft which, in its results, made our national possessions familiarly known, in the far parts of the world, to students who could never hope to see the wonderful handicraft of the old Greek sculptors, otherwise than as it is reflected and transmitted by the handicraft of the skilled modern draughtsman. CORBOULD had the eye to see artistic beauty and the soul to enjoy it. He was not one of the artists who are artisans, in everything but the name. In the 'Ancient Marbles in the British Museum,' published under the active encouragement of the Trustees and of their Principal Librarians, during a long series of years, CORBOULD, as draughtsman, had just the work for which Nature had pre-eminently fitted him. TICULARLY, Joseph PLANTA also took his share in the compilation of AND, PAR the Catalogues both of Printed Books and of Manuscripts. In this department, as in the archæological one, he extended the benefits of his zealous labour to the scholar abroad as well as to the scholar at home. What was carefully prepared was liberally printed and liberally circulated. PLANTA wrote with his own hand part of the published Catalogue of the Printed Books, and much of the Catalogue of the Collonian Manuscripts. To the latter he prefixed a brief life of the Founder, by which I have gladly and thankfully profited in my own more extended labour at the beginning of this volume. One incidental employment which Mr. PLANTA's office entailed upon him-as Principal Librarian-was of a less grateful kind. It merits notice on more than one account, |