First, ‘Although the public faith hath been thus engaged to provide for the better reception and more convenient use of the Cottonian Library, a proper repository for that purpose hath not yet been prepared, for the want of which the said Library did ... suffer by a fire;’
And secondly, ‘Arthur Edwards, late of Saint George’s, Hanover Square, in the county of Middlesex, Esquire, being desirous to preserve for the public use the said Cottonian Library, and to prevent the like accident for the future, bequeathed the sum of seven thousand pounds’—after the occurrence of a certain contingent event—for the purpose either of erecting, ‘in a proper situation, such a house as might be most likely to preserve that Library from all accidents, or—in the event of the performance by the Public, before the falling out of the contingency above mentioned, of that duty to which it already stood pledged by Act of Parliament, then—for the purpose of purchasing such manuscripts, books of antiquities, ancient coins, medals, and other curiosities, as might be worthy to increase the Cottonian Library aforesaid;’ to which end the same public benefactor further bequeathed his own library.
In order therefore to give due effect, at length, both to the primary donation of Sir John Cotton, and to the additional benefaction made thereto by Major Arthur Edwards, Parliament now enacted that a general repository should be provided for the several collections of Cotton, Edwards, and Sloane, and that Major Edwards’ legacy of money should be paid to the Trustees created by the new Act, in accordance with the provisions heretofore recited in Sir Hans Sloane’s codicil of 1749.
It is to the exertions, at this time, of Arthur Onslow, the then Speaker of the House of Commons, that historical students owe their debt of gratitude for the preservation of the Harleian Manuscripts from that dispersion,—abroad as well as at home,—which befel the Harleian printed books.
When the Memorial of Sloane’s Trustees was first presented to George the Second, he received it with the stolid indifference to all matters bearing upon science and mental culture, which was as saliently characteristic of that king as were his grosser vices. ‘I don’t think there are twenty thousand pounds in the Treasury,’ was the remark with which he dismissed the proposal. Money could be found, indeed, for very foolish purposes, and for very base ones. And the bareness of the Treasury was, very often, the natural result of the profligacy of the Court. But, in 1753, it was a fact.
Save for Speaker Onslow’s exertions, the Memorial would have fared little better in Parliament than at Court. The then Premier, Henry Pelham, was not unfriendly to the scheme, nor was he, like his royal master, a man of sordid nature; but a Minister who was every now and then obliged to write to his ambassadors abroad, even in the crisis of important negotiations, ‘I have ordered you a part of your last year’s appointments, but we are so poor that I can do no more,’ could hardly be eager to provide forty or fifty thousand pounds for the purchase of a new Museum and the safety of an old Library.
Onslow proposed—eventually—as a means of overcoming these difficulties, that a sum of money should be raised by a public lottery, and that it should be large enough to effect not only the immediate objects contemplated by the Will of Sir Hans Sloane, and by the prior public establishment of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library, but to purchase for a like purpose the noble series of Manuscripts which had passed (just eleven years before Sloane’s death) to the executors of the last Earl of Oxford, in trust for his widow, the Dowager Countess, and for his daughter, the Duchess of Portland.
Edward, Earl of Oxford, had stood at one period of his life, in the rank of the wealthiest of Englishmen. He was the owner of estates worth some four or five hundred thousand pounds. He was, too, a man of highly intellectual and studious tastes; but, in his case, a magnificent style of living, great generosity, and excessive trust in dependants, did what is more usually the work of huge folly or of gross sins; they brought him into circumstances which, for his position in life, might almost be called those of poverty. But for this comparative impoverishment, his own act—it is more than probable—would have secured to posterity the enjoyment, in its entirety, of the splendid library he had inherited and increased.
To the proposal of a lottery there was much solid objection. What were then called ‘parliamentary lotteries’ had been introduced expressly to put down those private lotteries, common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had been fraught with mischief. It was hoped, or pretended, that a ‘regulated’ evil would be reduced within tolerable limits, whilst bringing grist to the national mill. But the forty years that had passed since the first parliamentary lottery of 1709 had shown that the system was essentially and incurably mischievous. Pelham was averse to its continuance. As First Lord of the Treasury, it was his poverty, not his will, that consented to the adoption of so questionable an expedient for the purchase of the Sloane Collections. He had not, individually, any such love of learning as might have induced an appeal to Parliament to set, for once, an example of liberal and far-sighted legislation. He merely stipulated that some stringent provisos should be put into the Act, directed against the nefarious practices of the lottery-jobbers.
Eventually, it was enacted that there should be a hundred thousand shares, at three pounds a share; that two hundred thousand pounds should be allotted as prizes, and that the remaining hundred thousand—less the expenses of the lottery itself—should be applied to the threefold purposes of the Act, namely, the purchase of the Sloane and Harleian Collections; the providing of a Repository; and the creation of an annual income for future maintenance.
By the precautionary clauses of the Bill, provision was made for the prolonged sale of shares; for the prevention of the purchase by any one adventurer of more than twenty shares, or ‘tickets,’ and for other impediments, as it was thought, to a fraudulent traffic in the combined covetousness and ignorance of the unwary.
All these precautions proved to be vain. Mr. Pelham’s opposition was abundantly justified by the result. Fraud proved to be, in that age, just as inseparable an element in a Lottery scheme, however good its purpose, as fraud has proved to be, in this age, an inseparable element (at one stage or other of the business) in a Railway scheme,—however useful the line proposed to be made.
It thus came to pass that the foundation of the British Museum gave rise to a great public scandal. When evidence was produced that many families had been brought to misery, as the first incident in the annals of a beneficent and noble foundation, a somewhat dull Session of Parliament was suddenly enlivened by an animated and angry debate.
The provident clauses in the Lottery Act of 1753 were made of no effect, mainly by entrusting the chief share in working the Act to an accomplished jobber. One Peter Leheup was made a Commissioner of the Lottery. This man had held some employment or other at Hanover, from which he had been recalled with circumstances of disgrace. |1753. December.| It is to be inferred, from the way in which his name points an epigrammatic phrase in one of the letters of Bolingbroke,[53] and in more than one of those of Horace Walpole, that it had come, long before this appointment took place, to have a sort of proverbial currency, like the names of ‘Curll’ or of ‘Chartres.’ But, be that as it may, Mr. Commissioner Leheup set on foot as thriving and as flagitious a traffic in Sloane lottery tickets, as was ever set on foot in railway shares by a clever promoter of our own day. He wrote circular letters instructing his correspondents how most effectually to evade the Act. He sold nearly three hundred tickets to a single dealer by furnishing him with a list of ‘Roes’ and ‘Does,’ ‘Gileses’ and ‘Stileses’ at discretion. He supplied himself, with equal liberality; and contrived to close the subscription, after an actual publicity of exactly six hours—for the issue of one hundred thousand tickets. In a few days, of course, tickets in abundance were to be had, at sixteen shillings premium upon each, and in what looked to be a still rising market. The trap proved to be brilliantly ‘successful.’
The subsequent explosion of parliamentary anger was rather increased than lessened by an attempt of Henry Fox (afterwards the first Lord Holland) to extenuate Leheup’s offence by some arguments of the ‘Tu quoque’ sort. By a great majority, the House of Commons sent up an address praying the King to direct his Attorney General to prosecute the chief offender, who was accordingly convicted and fined a thousand pounds. It is not uninstructive to note that Horace Walpole—himself one of the Sloane Trustees—treats the matter in one of his letters exactly in the offhand man-of-the-world style in which Henry Fox had treated it in the House of Commons.[54]
By this unfortunate episode, the name of one of the best of Englishmen was brought into a sort of momentary connection with the name of one of the worst. But the chief discredit of the story does not really rest upon Leheup. A private citizen, of moderate means, had been willing to expend seventy or eighty thousand pounds—besides an inestimable amount of labour and research—upon an object essentially and largely public. Yet a British Parliament could not summon up enough of public spirit to tax its own members, in common with their tax-paying fellow subjects throughout the realm, to the extent of a hundred thousand pounds, in order to meet an obvious public want, to redeem an actual parliamentary pledge, and to secure a conspicuous national honour for all time to come. That want of public spirit did not exhaust its results with the ruin of the poor families, scattered here and there, whose scanty means had been hazarded and lost by gambling, under a parliamentary temptation. It impressed itself, so to speak, on the subsequent history of the institution for more than forty years. The Museum had been founded grudgingly. It was kept up parsimoniously.
Had that fact been otherwise, the story of the knavery of Peter Leheup would have little merited recital a century after it, and he, had passed into oblivion.
The value of so small an incident in the crowded story of our National Museum lies simply in the fact that it forms a just and salient illustration of the narrowness of spirit with which the then representatives of the people received the liberal gift of public benefactors. It serves to show why it was that, from the year 1753 down to some years after 1800, the History of the British Museum casts very little honour on Britain as a nation, whereas the precedent history of its integral parts, as separate and infant collections, casts, and will long continue to cast, great honour on the memory of the Cottons, the Harleys, and the Sloanes, by whom they were painfully gathered and most liberally dispensed.
Happily, as the course of this narrative—whatever its shortcomings—cannot fail to show, the literary and scientific treasures which men of that stamp had collected, came, in a subsequent generation (and, in a chief measure, by dint of the exertions of the Trustees and Officers to whom they had been, in course of time, confided) to be more adequately estimated by Ministers and by Parliament in their public capacity, as well as by the more cultivated portion of the people generally. For more than a half-century past the History of the British Museum has been one that any Briton may take delight and pride in telling. And such it promises to be, preeminently, in the time yet to come. In a conspicuous sense, the men by whom it was first founded, and the men by whom, for what is now a long time past, it has been administered and governed, have alike been true workers for Posterity.
“The King made this Ordinance:—That there should be a mission of three of the brethren of Solomon’s House, whose errand was only to give us knowledge of the affairs and state of those countries to which they were designed, and especially of the Sciences ... and Inventions of all the World; and withal to bring us books, instruments, and patterns in every kind....
“We have also precious stones, of all kinds; many of them of great beauty.... Also, store of fossils.... But we do hate all impostures and lies, insomuch as we have severally forbidden it to all our fellows, under pain of ignominy or fines, that they do not show any natural work or thing adorned or swelling, but only pure as it is, without affectation of showing marvels....
“We have also those who take care to consider of the former labours and Collections, and out of them to direct new explorations ... more penetrating into Nature than the former.... Upon every invention of value we erect a statue to the inventor, and give him a liberal and honourable reward.
“We have hymns and services, which we say daily, of laud and thanks to God for His marvellous works, and forms of prayer imploring His blessing for the illumination of our labours.”—Bacon, ‘New Atlantis, a Work unfinished.’
‘A Museum of Nature does not aim, like one of Art, merely to charm the eye and gratify the sense of beauty and of grace.
‘As the purpose of a Museum of Natural History is to ... impart and diffuse that knowledge which begets the right spirit in which all Nature should be viewed, there ought to be no partiality for any particular class, merely on account of the quality which catches and pleases the passing gaze. Such a Museum should subserve the instruction of a People; and should also afford objects of study and comparison to professed Naturalists, so as to serve as an instrument in the progress of Science.’—
Househunting.—The Removal of the Sloane Museum from Chelsea.—Montagu House, and its History.—The Early Trustees and Officers.—The Museum Regulations.—Early Helpers in the Foundation and Increase of the British Museum.—Epochs in the Growth of the Natural History Collections.—Experiences of Inquiring Visitors in the years 1765–1784.
The practical good sense which had always been a marked characteristic in the life of Sir Hans Sloane is seen just as plainly in those clauses of his Will by which he leaves much latitude, in respect of means and agencies, to the discretion of his Executors and Trustees. It is seen, for example, when, after reciting some views of his own as to the methods by which his Museum should be maintained for public use, he adds the proviso—‘in such manner as they (the Trustees) shall think most likely to answer the public benefit by me intended.’ He had a love for the old Manor House at Chelsea, and contemplated, as it seems, with some special complacency, the maintenance there of the Collections which had added so largely to the pleasures of his own fruitful life. But he was careful not to tie down his Trustees to the continuance of the Museum at Chelsea, as a condition of his bounty. They were at liberty to assent to its removal, should the balance of public advantage seem to them to point towards removal.
Chelsea was in that day a quiet suburban village, distant from the heart of London. As the site of a Museum it had many advantages, but it was, comparatively and to the mass of visitors and students, a long way off. The Trustees assented to a generally expressed opinion that whilst the new institution ought not to be placed in any of the highways of traffic, it ought to be nearer to them than it would be, if continued in its then abode.
One of the first places offered for their choice was the old Buckingham House (now the royal palace). It was already a large and handsome structure. The charm of its position, at that time, was not unduly boasted of in the golden letters of the inscription conspicuous upon its entablature—
Its prospects, as described not very long before by the late ducal owner, ‘presented to view at once a vast town, a palace, and a cathedral, on one side; and, on the other sides, two parks, and a great part of Surrey.’ Its fine gardens ended in ‘a little wilderness, full of blackbirds and nightingales.’ Yet it was close to the Court end of the town. But the price was thirty thousand pounds.
Another offer was that of Montagu House at Bloomsbury. Less charmingly placed, and architecturally less striking in appearance than was its rival, both its situation and its plan were better fitted for the purposes of a public Museum. |Montagu House and its History.| It stood, it is true, on the extreme verge of the London of that day. Northward, there was nothing between it and the distant village of Highgate, save an expanse of fields and hedgerows. And for a long distance, both to the east and the west, no part of London had yet spread beyond it, except an outlying hospital or two. But there were already indications that the town would extend in that northerly direction, more quickly than in almost any other. The house had seven and-a-half acres of garden and shrubberies; and its price was but ten thousand, two hundred and fifty pounds.
Montagu House had been built about sixty years before for Ralph Montagu, first Duke of Montagu. A spacious court separated the house from Great Russell Street, towards which it presented to view only a screen of pannelled brickwork, having a massive gateway and cupola in the centre, and turreted wings, masking the domestic offices, at either end. The house itself was rather stately than beautiful, but its chief rooms and its grand staircase were elaborately painted by the best French artists of the day. And the appendant offices were more than usually extensive.
It stood on the site of a structure of much greater architectural pretensions, erected for the same owner, only twelve years before, from the designs of Robert Hooke. That first Montagu House had been burned to the ground.
The offer of Montagu House was accepted by the Trustees and approved by the Government. It was found needful to make considerable alterations in order to adapt the building to its new uses. This outlay increased the eventual cost of the mansion, and of its appliances and fittings, to somewhat more than twenty-three thousand pounds. The adaptation, with the removal and re-arrangement of the Collections, occupied nearly five years. It was not until the beginning of the year 1759 that the Museum was opened for public inspection. When removed to Bloomsbury, it was but brought back to within a few hundred yards of its first abode.
We have seen that according to the plan for the government of the institution which Sloane had sketched in his Codicil of July, 1749, there would have been a Board of Visitors as well as a Board of Trustees. But, by the foundation Statute, enacted in 1753, both of these Boards were incorporated into one. Forty-one Trustees were constituted, with full powers of management and control. Six of these were representatives of the several families of Cotton, Harley, and Sloane, the head, or nearest in lineal succession, of each family having the nomination, from time to time, of such representatives or ‘Family Trustees,’ when, by death or otherwise, vacancies should occur. Twenty were ‘Official’ Trustees, in accordance, so far, with Sloane’s scheme for the constitution of his Board of Visitors; and by these two classes, conjointly, the other fifteen Trustees were to be elected.
The Official Trustees were to be the holders for the time being of the following offices:—(1) The Archbishop of Canterbury, (2) the Lord Chancellor, (3) the Speaker of the House of Commons, (4) the Lord President of the Council, (5) the First Lord of the Treasury, (6) the Lord Privy Seal, (7) the First Lord of the Admiralty, (8 and 9) the Secretaries of State, (10) the Lord Steward, (11) the Lord Chamberlain, (12) the Bishop of London, (13) the Chancellor of the Exchequer, (14) the Lord Chief Justice of England, (15) the Master of the Rolls, (16) the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, (17) the Attorney-General, (18) the Solicitor-General, (19) the President of the Royal Society, (20) the President of the College of Physicians.
To the first three of these Official Trustees Parliament entrusted the appointment, from time to time, of all the Officers of the Museum, except the Principal Librarian, who is to be appointed by the Crown, on the nomination of the ‘Principal Trustees,’ as the first three Trustees—the Archbishop, Chancellor, and Speaker—have always been called.
The following fifteen persons were the first elected Trustees, under the Act of 1753:—The Duke of Argyle, the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Willoughby of Parham, Lord Charles Cavendish, the Honourable Philip Yorke, Sir George Lyttelton, Sir John Evelyn, James West, Nicholas Hardinge, William Sloane, William Sotheby, Charles Grey, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Birch, James Ward, and William Watson. |Records of British Museum, in MS. Addit., 6179.| The first meeting of the Trustees under the Act was held at the Cockpit, Whitehall, on the 17th of December, 1753.
The first ‘Principal Librarian’[55] was Dr. Gowin Knight, a member of the College of Physicians, and eminent, in his day, as a cultivator of experimental science. Some magnetic apparatus of his construction and gift was placed in the Museum soon after its opening, and attracted, in its day, much attention. He received the appointment after a keen competition with the more widely-known physician and botanist, Sir John Hill. The first three ‘Keepers of Departments’ were Dr. Matthew Maty, Dr. Charles Morton, and Mr. James Empson. Dr. Knight retained his post until 1772.
Maty and Morton succeeded in turn to the office of Principal Librarian, and their respective services will have a claim to notice hereafter. Empson had been the valued servant and friend of Sir Hans Sloane. He is the only officer whose name appears in Sloane’s Will. He had served him as Keeper of the Museum at Chelsea for many years.
There is, in one of the letters of Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, an amusing account of an initiatory meeting of the original Trustees, held prior to their formal constitution by Parliament. It is marked by the writer’s usual superciliousness towards all hobbies, except the dilettante hobby which he himself was wont to ride so hard. ‘I employ my time chiefly, at present,’ he wrote to Mann, in February, 1753, ‘in the guardianship of embryos and cockle shells. Sir Hans Sloane valued his Museum at eighty thousand pounds, and so would anybody who loves hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese.... We are a charming wise set—all Philosophers, Botanists, Antiquarians, and Mathematicians—and adjourned our first meeting because Lord Macclesfield, our Chairman, was engaged in a party for finding out the Longitude.’
‘One of our number,’ continues Walpole, ‘is a Moravian, who signs himself “Henry XXVIII, Count de Reuss.” The Moravians have settled a colony at Chelsea, in Sir Hans’ neighbourhood, and I believe he intended to beg Count Henry the Twenty-Eighth’s skeleton for his Museum.’ This distinguished foreigner does not appear in the parliamentary list.
The Chairman of the preliminary meeting so airily described by Walpole, continued, under the definitive constitution of the Trust, to take a leading part in its administration. It appears to have been by Lord Macclesfield that the original ‘Statutes and Bye-laws’ of the Museum, or many of them, were drafted.’
In the form in which they were first issued, in 1759, these statutes directed that the Museum should ‘be kept open every day in the week, except Saturday and Sunday.’ |1759–1803.| For the greater part of the year the public hours were from nine o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon. On certain days, in the summer months, the open hours were from four o’clock in the afternoon until eight—so as to meet the requirements of persons actively engaged in business during the early part of the day. But the publicity was hampered by a system of admission-tickets which had to be applied for on a day precedent to that of every intended visit. The application had first to be made, then registered; a second application had to follow, in order to receive the ticket; and the ticket could rarely be used at the time of receiving it. |MS. Addit., 6179, ff. 36, seqq.| So that, in practice, each visit to the Museum had commonly to be preceded by two visits to the ‘Porter’s Lodge.’
The visitors were admitted in parties, at the prescribed hours, and were conducted through the Museum by its officers according to a routine which, practically and usually, allowed to each group of visitors only one hour for the inspection of the whole. Special arrangements, however, were made for those who resorted to the Museum for purposes of study. |Statutes and Regulations, part ii, § 3.| To such, say the statutes, ‘a particular room is allotted, in which they may read or write without interruption during the time the Museum is kept open.’
The aggregate number of persons admitted as visitors—exclusive of students—was, for some years, restricted to sixty persons, as a maximum, in any one day.
In order to give the reader a definite and clear idea of what was seen, in 1759, by the earliest visitors to the British Museum, in its rudimentary state, some sort of ground plan is essential, but the merest outline will suffice for the purpose.
There were at Montagu House two floors or stories of state apartments. The upper floor was that which was first shown, after the formation of the Museum.
The visitor, having ascended the superb staircase painted by La Fosse, passed through a vestibule and grand saloon (A B) furnished with various antiquities, into the ‘Cottonian Library’ (C), and thence into the ‘Harleian Library,’ which occupied three rooms (D, E, and F). He then entered the ‘Medal Room’—containing the coins and medals of the Sloane and Cotton collections (G); the ‘Sloane Manuscript Room’ (H); and the room containing the chief part of the antiquities (I)—
Rough Diagram, showing Principal Floor of the original British Museum of 1759.
Then the visitor, passing again through the vestibule (A) and great saloon (B), entered the rooms K, L, and M. K contained the minerals and fossils of Sir Hans Sloane’s collection; L, the shells; M, the plants and insects. Thence he passed into N, which was devoted to the bulk of the Sloane Zoological Collection, and into O, containing artificial and miscellaneous curiosities.
Descending to the floor beneath, by the secondary staircase between N and O, the visitor then entered the small room P, which contained the magnetic apparatus given by Dr. Gowin Knight, and the rooms, Q and R devoted to the reception of the greater part of the Royal Library, restored by Henry, Prince of Wales, and augmented—but with extreme parsimony—by several of the Stuart monarchs, whose additions to the shelves were, indeed, much oftener made of books given, than of books bought. He then passed into Sloane’s Printed Library, which occupied the whole of the spacious and handsome suite of rooms S, T, V, W, X, and Y, and (passing through the Trustees’ Room Z,) entered the room A A, containing the Edwards Library; ending his tour of inspection in the room B B, in which was arranged the remainder of the old Royal Library, the main portion whereof had been seen already in Q and R.
Rough Diagram, showing Ground Plan of the original British Museum of 1759.
When the combined Museum and Libraries, thus arranged, were first opened to the inspection of the curious Public in 1759, the collections enumerated in the Foundation Act of 1753 had, it is seen, already received some notable increase by gifts. |Early Helpers in the Foundation and Growth of the British Museum.| The first donor was the House of Lords, by whose order the historical collections of Thomas Rymer, royal historiographer, and editor of the Fœdera, were given to the Trustees, immediately after their incorporation. |1755–57.| Then followed, in 1757, the gift of the Royal Library and that of the Lethieullier Antiquities from Egypt. [See Chapter II.]
The next donor, in order of time, was a Jewish merchant, and stock-broker, of humble origin, but of princely disposition. |1759. Da Costa’s Hebrew Collection.—History of the Collector.| Solomon Da Costa was one of the many men who have done honour to commerce not merely by its successful prosecution, but by the conspicuous union of mercantile astuteness with noble tastes and true beneficence. |Correspondence of Thomas Hollis.| His talents for business enabled him to make a hundred thousand pounds—which in his day was more, perhaps, than the equivalent of four hundred thousand in ours. He had made it, says a keen observer, who knew the man well, ‘without scandal or meanness.’ When wealth made him independent, he spent his new leisure, not in luxury but in hard labour for the poor.
Da Costa had come, from Amsterdam, into England, in the year 1704. His struggling Hebrew compatriots were among the earliest sharers in his bounty. But his heart was too large to suffer that bounty to be limited by considerations either of race or of local neighbourhood. To him, as to the Samaritan of old, distress made kinship. He was wont to journey, from time to time, through thirty or forty parishes of Surrey and of Kent, with the punctual diligence of a commercial traveller, simply to succour the distressed by that best of all succour, the provision of means through which, in time, self-help would be developed and ensured. Provident loans, clothing-funds, the education and apprenticeship of necessitous children, were the forms in which Da Costa’s benevolence delighted to invest not only his money, but his personal exertion and his cordial sympathy. He devoted more than a thousand pounds a year to the benefit of Christian Englishmen, besides all that he gave to the poor of his own faith and race. And to both he gave, without noise or ostentation.
He had, too, the breadth of view which enabled him to put, on their true foot of equality, the claims of the necessitous mind, as well as those of the necessitous body. Unlike many other men of genuine beneficence, popular estimates of giving did not mislead him into one-sidedness of aim.
Within a few years of Da Costa’s arrival in England, probably about the year 1720, and when, with youthful ardour, he was seeking to acquire knowledge as well as to make money, he met, at a bookseller’s, with a remarkable collection of Hebrew books, of choice editions and in rich and uniform bindings. The collection had that sumptuousness of aspect which invited inquiry into its origin. All that he could learn on that score was the probability that some statesman or other of the Commonwealth period, had collected them for a public but unfulfilled purpose, and that they had fallen—with so much other spoil—into the hands of Charles the Second. By that King’s order they had received, if not their rich binding, at least his crown and cypher as marks of the royal appropriation, and then (in a truly Carolinian fashion) were left in the hands of the King’s stationer for lack of payment of the charge of what—whether binding or mere decoration—had been done to the books by the royal command. Da Costa prized them as among his chief treasures, but directly he heard of the foundation of a great repository of learning, the emotions of the Jewish broker were such as might have been felt by ‘broad-browed Verulam,’ could he have lived to see that day; save only that Bacon would first have scanned the evidence about the origin of the institution, and would have discriminated the praise.
Da Costa wrote a letter to the Trustees. The generous heart is facile in ascribing generosity. ‘A most stately monument’ said Da Costa, ‘hath been lately erected and endowed, by the wisdom and munificence of the British Legislature,’ and he accompanied his eulogy with a prayer that the Almighty would ‘render unto them a recompense, according to the work of their hands.’ |Da Costa to the Trustees of the Brit. Museum, ‘5th of Sivan, 5519’ [1759]|. He brought his mite of contribution, he added, not only as proof of sympathy with the work in progress, ‘but as a thanksgiving offering, in part, for the generous protection and numberless blessings which I have enjoyed under the British Government.’
The gift embraced several Biblical Manuscripts of value, and a still choicer series of early printed books, one hundred and eighty in number. The giver has a merited place in the roll of our public benefactors; and his devout prayer for the new Museum, ‘May it increase and multiply ... to the benefit of the people of these nations and of the whole earth,’ has had a more conspicuous fulfilment than could, in 1759, have been imagined by the most sanguine of bystanders.
Three years afterwards, and soon after his accession to the throne, King George the Third gave to the Nation that most curious assemblage of nearly the whole English literature of two and twenty eventful years of Civil War,—open or furtive,—which is known to the Public as the ‘Thomason Collection,’ though its technical name within the Museum walls continues, as of old, to be ‘the King’s Tracts.’
That name is the less appropriate from its tendency to give an inaccurate idea of the contents of the King’s gift, as well as from its disregard of the origin of the Collection. The ‘tracts’ include the most ponderous theological quartos that ever came from an English press as well as the tiniest handbill, or the fugitive circular which called together a ‘Committee of Sequestrators’ at Wallingford House.
George Thomason, its collector, was an eminent London bookseller, of royalist sympathies, who watched intensely the progress of the great struggle between King and Parliament, Cavalier and Roundhead, and who had noted with professional keenness how strikingly the printing press was made to mirror, almost from day to day, the strife of senators in council, as well as that of soldiers in the field. He had seized, in 1641, the idea of helping posterity the better to realize every phase of the great conflict, the oncoming of which many men had long foreseen, by gathering everything which came out in print—as far as vigilant industry could do so—whether belonging to literature, and to the obvious materials of history, or merely subserving the most trivial need of the passing moment. He failed, of course, to secure everything; but his endeavour was wonderfully successful, on the whole. He also gathered many manuscripts which no printer in England dared to put into type. And he obtained a large number of political and historical pieces, bearing on English affairs, which had issued from foreign presses; their authors being sometimes foreign observers of the struggle, but more frequently British refugees.
Charles the First congratulated Thomason on the utility of his idea. More than once the King was able to gratify his curiosity by borrowing some tract or other which only our collector was known to possess. The Parliament, meanwhile, was far from exhibiting any literary sympathies in the undertaking. Some of its leaders loved freedom of the press when it was seen to be a channel for urging forward their peculiar doctrines and aims, but had the gravest doubts about its policy when it manifestly helped their opponents and gave back blow for blow. The ‘Thomason Collection’ came to be viewed, at length, much in the light in which soldiers view an enemy’s battery. If it could be captured and carried off, some of the pieces might be turned against the enemy. If the attempt at complete capture should miscarry, a sudden sally might at least enable the assailants to destroy what they had failed to secure.
Hence it was that the poor Collector came to be in such alarm about the possible fate of his treasures that he had them repeatedly packed into cases, and, as the successes of the war veered to and fro, sent them, at one time, far to the south of London; at another time, as far to the east; now, smuggled them, concealed between the real and false tops of tables, into a city warehouse; and anon made a colourable sale of them to the University of Oxford.
When the King enjoyed his own again, the Collection was offered, as fit to be made a royal one. It contained more than thirty-three thousand separate publications—bound in about 2,200 volumes—issued between 1640 and 1662 inclusive. But Charles the Second was busied with pursuits having little to do with any kind of learning, and was ill inclined, as we have seen already, to burden his Treasury for the enrichment of his Library. Sir Thomas Bodley’s Trustees at Oxford refused the offer, in their turn, under a very different but scarcely less obstructive pressure. Their excellent founder had formed peculiar and stringent views about the literature worthy of a great University. He had warned them against stuffing his library with ‘mere baggage books.’ And so future Bodleian curators had, in another age, to buy with large bank notes many things which their predecessors could have bought with small silver coins;—just as in the ancient story.
The unfortunate Collection went a-begging. The books passed from hand to hand, somewhat, it would seem, by way of pledge or mortgage. They had cost a large sum of money, and a larger amount of toil. When his expectations were at their best the first owner, it is said, refused several thousands of pounds for them. |The Acquirement of the Thomason Collection by George III.| His ultimate successors in the possession were glad, in 1762, to accept, at the hands of King George the Third, three hundred pounds. The purchase was recommended to him by Thomas Hollis, and also by Lord Bute, as a serviceable addition to the newly founded Museum. |1762.| As all readers now know, it has largely subserved our history already. It is not less certain that the ‘Thomason Collection’ embodies a store of information yet unused.