Chap. II. OF THE H. ELLIS. great familiarity with the whole service of the Museum BOOK III, which he had acquired during his labours as Secretary HISTORY from the year 1814. The secretarial duty had been com- MUSEUM bined with the functions of keepership during thirteen UNDER SIR years. Great punctuality, a conspicuous faculty for method and memory, and very courteous manners, were qualifications which are not always, or necessarily, found in union with conspicuous industry. In him they were combined. Nevertheless, he narrowly escaped losing the merited reward of long and assiduous labours. For he had a formidable competitor. THE CANDI DATURE OF FYNES At this time, a most accomplished scholar, who deservedly possessed large influence, both social and political, had MR. H. obtained the virtual promise of almost the highest per- CLINTON. sonage in the realm that whenever Mr. PLANTA died he should receive the offer of successorship. Mr. Henry FYNES CLINTON, in those quiet ante-reform days, had been able, for twenty years, to unite the functions of a Member of Parliament with the assiduous pursuits of scholarship in one of its highest forms. Learning had higher charms for him than Politics, and he had no turn for debate, but he had steadily attended the House of Commons while giving to the world his Fasti Hellenici and Fasti Romani. Six months before Mr. PLANTA's decease, the Archbishop of CANTERBURY had, in effect, promised Mr. FYNES CLINTON that he would nominate him to be Principal Librarian, and the Archbishop well knew that, as far as learning went, such an appointment would be applauded throughout Europe. The Archbishop (Dr. Charles MANNERS SUTTON), did not forget his promise, and his vote carried that of the then Speaker of the House of Commons, who was the Archbishop's son. Their joint communication with the Lord Chancellor procured his assent also. We have made,' BOOK III, Chap. 11. HISTORY OF THE MUSEUM UNDER SIR H. ELLIS. Letters and Journ. of H. rary Remains (1854), pass. Lord Lansdowne to Archbishop of Canterbury; 20 December, 1827. SERVICES AND CHARACTER OF SIR H. ELLIS. the Archbishop told Mr. FYNES CLINTON, 'your recommendation to the King as strong as possible.' The practice, as the reader will perhaps remember, was that the then Principal Trustees should in all such cases recommend to the Sovereign two names, with such observations upon them as to those Trustees might seem appropriate. As Mr. ELLIS was now the senior officer; had had the care successively of two several departments (MSS. and Printed Books); had also served as Secretary, and, in all these employments, had acquitted himself with diligence and credit, there could, of course, be no difficulty as to the name which should be submitted to GEORGE THE FOURTH in company with that of Mr. FYNES CLINTON. Other Trustees interested themselves in supporting, indirectly but efficiently, the claims of one who had served the Board so long. And the King was pleased to prefer the second name which had been placed before him by the Principal Trustees rather than the first. Lord LANSDOWNE received His Majesty's commands to signify to the Archbishop that it was upon the ground of 'long service in the Museum' that the King had made his choice. Those who had (like the writer) opportunity to watch, during most of the succeeding thirty years, the continuance of that service, know that the King's selection was justified. Sir Henry ELLIS was not gifted with any of those salient abilities which dazzle the eyes of men; but he had great power of labour, the strictest integrity of purpose, and a kind heart. He was ever, to the Trustees, a faithful servant, up to the full measure of his ability. To those who worked under him he was always courteous, considerate, and very often he was generous. He would sometimes expose himself to misconstruction, in order to appease discords. He would at times rather seem wanting in very Chap. II. HISTORY OF THE MUSEUM H. ELLIS. firmness of will than, by pressing his authority, wound the BOOK III, feelings of well-intentioned but irritable subordinates. No one could receive from him a merited reproof-I speak from personal experience without perceiving that the duty UNDER SIR of giving it was felt to be a painful duty. The Commissioners of 1850 had ample warrant for hinting, in their Report to the Crown-when alluding to certain internal disputes that the qualities least abounding in Sir Henry ELLIS'S composition were those which equip a man for Report (1850) such harsher duties of his office, as cannot be accomplished by the aid of conciliatory manners, the index of a benevolent disposition.' A man of that temper will now and then, in his own despite, get forced into a somewhat bitter controversy. One sharp attack on Sir Henry's administration of his Principal-Librarianship had a close connection with discords of an anterior date which had broken out in the Society of Antiquaries. The late Sir Harris NICOLAS would scarcely have criticised, with so much vehemence, what he thought to have been a careless indifference on ELLIS's part to the acquisition for the British Museum of an important body of historical manuscripts, preserved in a chateau in a distant corner of France (and offered to the Trustees in 1829), but for the circumstance that Sir Henry's kindly unwillingness, evinced a little while before, to desert a very weak colleague at Somerset-House had stood in the way of some much-needed reforms in that quarter. Without in the least intending beforehand to represent things unfairly, Sir H. NICOLAS acted under the influence of an unconscious bias or pre-judgment. The Joursanvault story is still worth telling, although it has now become an old story, and one portion of the historical treasures it relates to are now past wishing for, as an English possession. p. 32. THE STORY AT POMARD. BOOK III, Chap. II. HISTORY OF THE MUSEUM In the course of the revolutionary convulsions in France, a great body of historical documents had been abstracted from the famous old Castle of Blois. Eventually, as years UNDER SIR passed on, they found their way into the country-seat, at Pomard, of the Baron de JOURSANVAULT, and with them were amalgamated an extensive collection of old family papers, many books on genealogy, and some choice illuminated missals. H. ELLIS. An English gentleman long resident in France had formed the acquaintance of the Baron de JOURSANVAULT, and in the course of conversation came to hear of the exist ence of these historical treasures. He also perceived that their owner had little taste for them, or ability to profit by their contents. Sir Thomas Elmsley CROFT probed his French friend on the subject of parting with them. The Baron lent a willing ear, and, to whet his interlocutor's appetite, told him that a great many of the manuscripts related to the history of the English rule in France. Sir Thomas then apprised an English friend, famous for his love of old MSS., of the existence of the hoards, and of the certainty that the Baron who owned them would greatly prefer a few rouleaux of English gold to a whole castle-full of the most precious parchments that ever charmed the longing eyes of a Jonathan OLDBUCK—or a Harris NICOLAS. Sir Harris, directly he received this piece of news from Paris, passed it on to his friend the late Lord CANTerbury, then Speaker, who, in turn, communicated the information to Sir H. ELLIS, for the use of the Trustees. ELLIS was sent to France-whither indeed he had, just at that moment, arranged to go, in order to spend part of his holidays in Paris, according to his frequent custom. He reached Pomard (two hundred and fifty miles from OF THE H. ELLIS. ELLIS'S THE POMARD. tember. Paris) in September, 1829, and found a vast body of BOOK III, Chap. II. charters which had formed the archives of the medieval HISTORY Earls of Blois, together with many heraldic and genealogical MUSE manuscripts chiefly relating to French families. But he UNDER SIR found hardly any manuscripts which bore, directly, upon English history or affairs-the immediate object, it must be remembered, of the mission given him by the Trustees. Immediately on his return to Paris, Sir Henry wrote SIR HENRY thus to the Archbishop of CANTERBURY :—‘ -The Collection REPORT ON is indeed a most extraordinary one of its kind, and would HISTORICAL be a treasure in the stores of the British Museum, or of MSS. AT any other public Collection, though, perhaps, for a reason which will presently appear, some of the Trustees may think a public library of France would be its most appropriate repository. It is placed in two attics of the Chateau, 1829, Sepof considerable area and I should say sixteen feet in height-in cartons (or paste-board boxes), each two feet in length by one in depth and width. Each carton contains some hundreds of charters, at least whenever I examined them, and I made here and there my comparison with the catalogue of from twenty to thirty cartons, all answering to the catalogue and to the successive dates upon the outside of the boxes. . : . In one room there were above a hundred boxes piled up to the ceiling, the lower ones of which, where I could get at them, were full of instruments arranged as I have described. I counted also, in the same room, near a hundred and fifty bundles, all of single articles, partly piled up for want of room, and placed upon the floors. In the second room I counted a hundred and forty-nine cartons piled up like the former, and no ladder in the house to get at them. I did what I could upon a pair of steps made of two thin boards fastened to two other upright boards, but I had not even a safe pair of steps. Many of |