As the British Museum owes one choice portion of its archæological treasures to the man who was Nelson’s type of friendship, so also it owes—indirectly—another portion of them to the man who was Nelson’s favourite aversion, and whose very name, in the Admiral’s mind, served to sum up all that was most detestable. The Battle of the Nile, and the military operations which followed it in the after years, would have counted no antiquarian riches amongst their trophies, but for that ardent love of science in Napoleon which prompted him to plan the ‘Institute of Egypt’ as an essential part of the Campaign of Egypt.

The intention with which the Institute of Egypt was founded embraced every kind of study and research. The scholars of whom it was composed included within their number men of the most varied powers. What they effected was fragmentary, and yet their researches, directly or indirectly, bore much fruit.

In the end, the harvest was to France herself none the less abundant from the fact that Nelson’s achievement, and what grew thereout, set Englishmen and Germans to work with increased vigour in the same field, and divided some of the tools.

Scarcely had General Bonaparte established the military power of the French Republic in Egypt, before he was employed in organizing the Institute at Cairo. |1798–1801.| Its declared object was twofold: (1) the increase and diffusion of learning in Egypt itself; (2) the examination, study, and publication, of the monuments of its history and of its natural phenomena, together with the elucidation and improvement of the natural and industrial capabilities of the country. |Mémoires sur l’Egypt, passim.| The Institute was composed of thirty-six members, and was divided into four sections. The section with which alone we are here concerned—that of Literature, Arts, and History—was headed by Denon, and amongst its other members were Dutertre, Parseval, and Ripault. Its labours began in 1798, and were continued, with almost unparalleled activity, until the summer of 1801, when the defeat of Belliard near Cairo, and the capitulation of Menou at Alexandria, placed that part of the collections of the Institute which had not been already sent to France at the disposal of Lord Hutchinson.

Denon, on his return from Upper Egypt to Cairo, said, with French vivacity, that if the active movements of the Mamelukes now and then forced an antiquary to become, in self-defence, a soldier, the antiquary was enabled, by way of balance and through the good nature and docility of the French troops, to turn a good many soldiers into antiquaries. Had it not been for this general sympathy and readiness, one can hardly conceive that so much could have been accomplished, even under the eye of Napoleon, amidst perils so incessant. The Description de l’Egypte is for France at large, no less than for Napoleon and the men whom he set to work, a monument which might well obliterate the momentary mortification attendant on the transfer to London of a part of the treasures of the Institute. History, ancient or modern, scarcely offers a parallel instance in which war was made to contribute results so splendid, both for the progress of science and for the eventual improvement of the invaded country. To the labours initiated by Napoleon, and partially carried out by the ‘Institute of Egypt,’ the ablest of the recent rulers of that land owe some of their best and latest inspirations. Nor is it a whit less true that the most successful of our English Egyptologists have followed the track in which Frenchmen led the way. Such results, indeed, can never suffice to justify an unprovoked invasion. But they illustrate, in a marvellous way, how temporary evil is wrought into enduring good.

By the sixteenth article of the Capitulation of Alexandria, it was provided that the Members of the Institute of Egypt might carry back with them all instruments of science and art which they had brought from France, but that all collections of marbles, manuscripts, and other antiquities, together with the specimens of natural history and the drawings, then in the possession of the French, should be regarded as public property, and become subject to the disposal of the generals of the allied army.

The Convention was made between General Menou and General Hope, on the 31st of August, 1801. |1801, August.| Against this sixteenth article Menou made the strongest remonstrances, but General Hope declined to modify it, otherwise than by agreeing to make a reference, as to the precise extent to which it should be carried into actual effect, to Lord Hutchinson, as Commander-in-Chief.

Between Menou and Hutchinson there was a long correspondence. The French General declared that the Collections, both scientific and archæological, were private, not public property. The since famous ‘Rosetta stone,’ for example, belonged, he said, to himself. Various members of the Institute claimed other precious objects; some alleged, with obvious force of argument, that the care bestowed on specimens of natural history made them the property of the collectors and preservers; others threatened to prefer the destruction or defacement of their collections, by their own hands, to the giving of them up to the English army.

The correspondence was followed by several personal conferences between Menou and Colonel (afterwards General) Turner, in order to a compromise. Turner, who was himself a man of distinguished knowledge and accomplishments, advised Lord Hutchinson to insist on the transfer of the Marbles and Manuscripts, and to yield the natural history specimens, with some minor objects, to the possessors. The astute Capitan Pasha had contrived to place himself in ‘possession’ of one of the most precious of the marbles—the famous sarcophagus which Dr. Clarke so strenuously contended to be nothing less than the tomb of Alexander—by seizing the ship on board of which the French had placed it, and he gave Colonel Turner almost as much trouble as Menou himself had given.

The French soldiers were, as was natural, deeply mortified when they heard that the captors of Alexandria were to have the antiquities. Every man of them who had had to do with their excavation or transport had vindicated Denon’s eulogy by his pains to protect the sculptures from harm. Now, their excessive zeal and their national pride led to an unworthy result. The Rosetta stone was stripped of the soft cotton cloth and the thick matting in which it had been sedulously wrapped, and was thrown upon its face. Other choice antiquities were deprived of their wooden cases. |Capture of the Rosetta Stone;| When Turner, with a detachment of artillerymen and a strong tumbril, went to the French head-quarters to receive the Rosetta stone, he had to pass through a lane of angry Frenchmen who crowded the narrow streets of Alexandria, and were not sparing in their epithets and sarcasms. Those artillerymen, too, were the first English soldiers who entered the city. When Colonel Turner had gotten safely into his hands the stone destined to mark an era in philology, he returned good for evil. He permitted some members of the Institute of Egypt to take a cast of it, which they sent to Paris in lieu of the original.

The Rosetta inscription had been found, by the French explorers, among the ruins of a fortification near the mouth of the Rosetta branch of the Nile. When they discovered it the stone was already broken, both at the top and at the right side. Of its triple inscription, commemorative of the beginning of the actual and personal reign of Ptolemy Epiphanes—and therefore cut nearly two hundred years before the Christian era—that in the hieroglyphic or sacred character had suffered most. The second or enchorial inscription was also mutilated in its upper portion. The Greek version was almost entire.

The scarcely less famous Alexandrian sarcophagus was found by the French in the court-yard of a mosque called the ‘Mosque of St. Athanasius.’ |and of the Sarcophagus sometimes called ‘Tomb of Alexander.’| Of its discovery and state when found, the following account is given in the Description de l’Egypte:—A small octagonal building, covered with a cupola, had been constructed by the Moslems for their ablutions, and in this they had placed the sarcophagus to be used as a bath; piercing it for that purpose with large holes, but not otherwise injuring it. The sarcophagus is a monolith of dark-coloured breccia—such as the Italians call breccia verde d’Egitto—and is completely covered with hieroglyphics. |Description de l’Egypte, vol. v, pp. 373, seqq.; Plates and Append. (8vo edit.), 1829.| Their number, according to the French artist by whom impressions in sulphur were taken of the whole, exceeds 21,700. Dr. Clarke’s identification of this monument as the tomb of Alexander has not been supported by later Egyptologists.

This sarcophagus, with most of the other antiquities, was sent on board the flagship Madras. |List of the Egyptian Antiquities embarked at Alexandria.| The Rosetta inscription, Colonel Turner embarked, with himself, in the frigate Egyptienne. His own list of the antiquities thus brought, in safety, to England runs thus:—(1) An Egyptian sarcophagus, of green breccia; (2) another, of black granite, from Cairo; (3) another, of basalt, from Menouf; (4) the hand of a colossal statue—supposed to be Vulcan—found in the ruins of Memphis; (5) five fragments of lion-headed statues, of black granite, from Thebes; (6) a mutilated kneeling statue, of black granite; (7) two statues, of white marble, from Alexandria—Septimus Severus and Marcus Aurelius; (8) the Rosetta stone; (9) a lion-headed statue, from Upper Egypt; (10) two fragments of lions’ heads, of black granite; (11) a small kneeling figure, of black granite; (12) five fragments of lion-headed statues, of black granite; (13) a fragment of a sarcophagus, of black granite, from Upper Egypt; (14) two small obelisks, of basalt, with hieroglyphics; (15) a colossal ram’s head. Nos. 10 to 15 inclusive were all brought from Upper Egypt. (16) A statue of a woman, sitting, with a model of the capital of a column of the Temple of Isis at Dendera, between her feet; (17) a fragment of a lion-headed statue, of black granite, from Upper Egypt; (18) a chest of Oriental Manuscripts—sixty-two in number—in Coptic, Arabic, and Turkish.

I have given the more careful detail to this notice of the archæological results of the capitulation of Alexandria, inasmuch as a very inaccurate statement of the matter has found its way into an able and deservedly accredited book. |See the History of Europe, vol. v, p. 596 (last edition).| Sir Archibald Alison, in his History of Europe (probably from some misconception of the compromise effected between General Turner and the French Commander-in-Chief), writes thus:—‘General Hutchinson, with a generous regard for the interests of science and the feelings of these distinguished persons [the Members of the Institute of Egypt], agreed to depart from the stipulation and allow these treasures of art to be forwarded to France. The sarcophagus of Alexander, now in the British Museum, was, however, retained by the British, and formed the glorious trophy of their memorable triumph.’

General Turner’s conspicuous service on this occasion did not end with the transport into England of the Alexandrian Collections. Before the Rosetta inscription was, by the King’s command, placed, together with its companions, in the British Museum, as their permanent abode, General Turner obtained Lord Buckinghamshire’s assent to the temporary deposit of the stone from Rosetta in the custody of the Society of Antiquaries, by whose care copies of the inscriptions were sent to the chief scholars and academies of the Continent, in order that combined study might be brought to bear, immediately, upon the contents. This circumstance makes it all the more honourable to our countryman, Dr. Thomas Young, that by his labours upon the stone a strong impulse was first given to the progress of hieroglyphical discovery.

The accessions from Alexandria served, also, to initiate another improvement. When, in 1802, they reached the Museum, its contents had so increased that the old house afforded no adequate space for their reception. They had, like some famous sculptures of much later acquisition, to be placed in sheds which scarcely preserved them from bad weather, and were even less adapted to facilitate their study. |1804, July 2.| |Parliamentary Debates, vol. ii, col. 901, seqq.| The Trustees made their first application to Parliament for the enlargement of the Museum Building, ‘in order to provide suitable room for the preservation of invaluable monuments of antiquity which had been acquired by the valour, intrepidity, and skill of our troops in an expedition seldom equalled in the annals of the country.’ And before presenting their petition they determined that increased facilities should be given for the admission of the Public, as soon as they should be enabled to make an adequate increase in the staff of the establishment.

When the extension of the British Museum came first to be discussed in the House of Commons (somewhat grudgingly and captiously it must, in truth, be acknowledged), upon the application of the Trustees, some of their number were already aware that an accession was likely soon to accrue through the munificence of a fellow-trustee, which would make a new and extensive building indispensable. Charles Towneley had already made a Will in virtue of which—as it stood in 1804—the Towneley Marbles were devised in trust for the British Museum, on condition that the Trustees thereof should, ‘within two years from the time of the testator’s decease, set apart a room or rooms sufficiently spacious and elegant to exhibit these antiquities most advantageously to the Public,—such rooms to be exclusively set apart for the reception and future exhibition of the antiquities aforesaid.’ Circumstances not foreseen in 1802, when Colonel Towneley’s Will had been first made, led afterwards to a change in the mode in which his noble Collection was to be received by the Public. But its preservation and public accessibility, in one way or other, had long been resolved upon.

The Towneleys, of Towneley, rank among the most ancient and distinguished commoners of Lancashire. They can trace an honourable descent to a period antecedent to the Conquest. They have been seated at Towneley from the twelfth century. Several of them have given good service to England, in various ways, in spite of the obstacles and discouragements which, for many generations, clave to almost every man whose convictions obliged him to adhere to the Roman Catholic Church, and so to incur the pains and disabilities of recusancy. Of these they had their full share. One Towneley had been mulcted in fines amounting to more than five thousand pounds, simply for remaining true to his belief, and had been, for that cause, sent (with an ingenuity of torment one is almost tempted to call diabolic) from prison to prison across the breadth of England, and back again.^[60] Another Towneley was driven into an exile which lasted so long that when he returned into Lancashire everybody had forgotten his features and his voice, except his dog. But neither fine, imprisonment, nor banishment, had converted them to Protestantism. Hence it was that Charles Towneley, the Collector of the Marbles, received his education at Douay, and contracted all the strong formative impressions of early life and habit on the Continent.

He was born, in the old seat of the family at Towneley Hall, on the 1st of October, 1737. |Life of Charles Towneley.| His father, William Towneley, had married Cecilia, sole daughter and heir of Richard Standish, by his wife Lady Philippa Howard, daughter of Henry, Duke of Norfolk. The hall—which has not yet lost all its venerable aspect—was built in part by a Sir John Towneley in the reign of Henry VIII, and its older portions (turrets, gateway, chapel, and library) suit well the fine position of the building, and the noble woods which back it. Of the founder two things still remain in local tradition and memory. He took the changes made under the rule of Henry—or rather of Thomas Cromwell—so much in dudgeon, that when Lancaster Herald came to Towneley, upon his Visitation, he refused to admit him, saying, ‘Do not trouble thyself. There are no more gentlemen left in Lancashire now than my Lord of Derby, and my Lord Monteagle.’ The other tradition of this same Sir John is, that he enclosed a common pasture called Horelaw, and so made the peasantry as angry with his innovations as he was with Cromwell’s. Some of their descendants may yet chance to assure the inquisitive stranger, that his ghost still haunts the park, crying aloud in the dead of night—

At Douay Charles Towneley received a careful education, moulded, of course, under the conditions and the memories of that celebrated College. When he left its good priests he was already the owner of the family estates—his father having died prematurely in 1742—and he was plunged, at once, into the gaieties and temptations of Paris. All the Mentorship he had was that of a great uncle who had become sufficiently naturalised to win the friendship of Voltaire, and to be able to turn Hudibras into excellent French. The dissipations of the Capital overpowered, for a time, the real love of classical studies which had been excited in the provincial college. But the seed had been sown in a good soil. The study of art and of classical archæology, in particular, presently reasserted its claims and renewed its attractions. It was a fortunate circumstance, too, that family affairs required the presence of Mr. Towneley in England on the attainment of his majority.

He had left Towneley very young. He came back to it with more of the foreigner than of the Englishman in his ways of life and manners. But he was able to win the genuine regard of his neighbours, and to take his fair share in their pursuits and sports, although he could never—at least in his own estimation—succeed in expressing his thoughts with as much ease and readiness in English as in French. Late in life, he would speak of this conscious inability with regret. Whether needfully or not, the feeling, no doubt, prevented Mr. Towneley from turning to literary account his large acquirements.

What he had seen of the Continent had given him a desire to see more of it, and the bias of his youthful studies pointed in the same direction. In 1765, after a short stay in France, he went into Italy, and there he passed almost eight years. They were passed in a very different way from that in which he had passed the interval between Douay and Towneley. That long residence abroad enabled him to become a very conspicuous benefactor to his country.

He visited Naples, Florence, and Rome, and from time to time made many excursions into various parts of Magna Græcia and of Sicily. At Naples he formed the acquaintance of Sir William Hamilton and of D’Hancarville. |Towneley’s Artistic Researches in Italy.| |1765–1778.| At Rome he became acquainted with three Englishmen, James Byres, Gavin Hamilton, and Thomas Jenkins, all of whom had first gone thither as artists, and step by step had come to be almost exclusively engrossed in the search after works of ancient art. The success and fame of Sir William Hamilton’s researches in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and of those, still earlier, of Thomas Coke of Holkham (afterwards Earl of Leicester), had given a strong impulse to like researches in other parts of Italy. Towneley caught the contagion, and was backed by large resources to aid him in the pursuit.

His first important purchase was made in 1768. It was that of a work already famous, and which for more than a century had been one of the ornaments of the Barberini Palace at Rome. This statue of a boy playing at the game of tali, or ‘osselets’ (figured in Ancient Marbles in the British Museum, part ii, plate 31), was found among the ruins of the Baths of Titus, during the Pontificate of Urban the Eighth. During the same year, 1768, Mr. Towneley acquired, from the Collection of Victor Amadei, at Rome, the circular urn with figures in high relief—which is figured in the first volume of Piranesi’s Raccolta di Vasi Antichi—and also the statue of a Nymph of Diana, seated on the ground. This statue was found in 1766 at the Villa Verospi in Rome.

Two years afterwards, several important acquisitions were made of marbles which were discovered in the course of the excavations undertaken by Byres, Gavin Hamilton, and Jenkins, amidst the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa near Tivoli. The joint-stock system, by means of which the diggings were effected, no less than the conditions which accompanied the papal concessions that authorised them, necessitated a wide diffusion of the spoil. But whenever the making of a desirable acquisition rested merely upon liberality of purse or a just discrimination of merit, Mr. Towneley was not easily outstripped in the quest. Amongst these additions of 1769–71 were the noble Head of Hercules, the Head said, conjecturally, to be that of Menelaus, and the ‘Castor’ in low relief (all of which are figured in the second part of Ancient Marbles).

Two terminal heads of the bearded Bacchus—both of them of remarkable beauty—were obtained in 1771 from the site of Baiæ. These were found by labourers who were digging a deep trench for the renewal of a vineyard, and were seen by Mr. Adair, who was then making an excursion from Naples. In the same year the statue of Ceres and that of a Faun (A. M., ii, 24) were purchased from the Collection in the Macarani Palace at Rome. In 1772 the Diana Venatrix and the Bacchus and Ampelus were found near La Storta. It was by no fault of Towneley’s that the Diana was in part ‘restored,’ and that blunderingly. He thought restoration to be, in some cases, permissible; but never deceptively; never when doubt existed about the missing part. In art, as in life, he clave to his heraldic motto ‘Tenez le vrai.’

In 1771, also, the famous ‘Clytie’—doubtfully so called—was purchased from the Laurenzano Collection at Naples.

The curious scenic figure on a plinth (A. M., part x) together with many minor pieces of sculpture, were found in the Fonseca Villa on the Cælian Hill in 1773. In the same year many purchases were made from the Mattei Collection at Rome. Amongst these are the heads of Marcus Aurelius and of Lucius Verus. And it was at this period that Gavin Hamilton began his productive researches amidst the ruins of the villa of Antoninus Pius at Monte Cagnolo, near the ancient Lanuvium. This is a spot both memorable and beautiful. The hill lies on the road between Genzano and Civita Lavinia. It commands a wide view over Velletri and the sea. To Hamilton and his associates it proved one of the richest mines of ancient art which they had the good fortune to light upon. Mr. Towneley’s share in the spoil of Monte Cagnolo comprised the group of Victory sacrificing a Bull; the Actæon; a Faun; a Bacchanalian vase illustrative of the Dionysia; and several other works of great beauty. The undraped Venus was found—also by Gavin Hamilton—at Ostia, in 1775.

In the next year, 1776, Mr. Towneley acquired one of the chiefest glories of his gallery, the Venus with drapery. This also was found at Ostia, in the ruins of the Baths of Claudius. But that superb statue would not have left Rome had not its happy purchaser made, for once, a venial deflection from the honourable motto just adverted to. The figure was found in two severed portions, and care was taken to show them, quite separately, to the authorities concerned in granting facilities for their removal. The same excavation yielded to the Towneley Collection the statue of Thalia. From the Villa Casali on the Esquiline were obtained the terminal head of Epicurus, and the bust thought to be that of Domitia. The bust of Sophocles was found near Genzano; that of Trajan, in the Campagna; that of Septimius Severus, on the Palatine, and that of Caracalla on the Esquiline. A curious cylindrical fountain (figured in A. M., i, § 10) was found between Tivoli and Præneste, and the fine representation in low relief of a Bacchanalian procession (Ib., part ii) at Civita Vecchia. All these accessions to the Towneley Gallery accrued in 1775 or 1776.

Of the date of the Collector’s first return to England with his treasures I have found no record. |The Towneley Gallery in England.| But it would seem that nearly all the marbles hitherto enumerated were brought to England in or before the year 1777. The house, in London, in which they were first placed was found to be inadequate to their proper arrangement. Mr. Towneley either built or adapted another house, in Park street, Westminster, expressly for their reception. Here they were seen under favourable circumstances as to light and due ordering. They were made accessible to students with genuine liberality. And few things gave their owner more pleasure than to put his store of knowledge, as well as his store of antiquities, at the service of those who wished to profit by them. He did so genially, unostentatiously, and with the discriminating tact which marked the high-bred gentleman, as well as the enthusiastic Collector.

A contemporary critic, very competent to give an opinion on such a matter, said of Mr. Towneley: ‘His learning and sagacity in explaining works of ancient art was equal to his taste and judgment in selecting them.’^[62] If, in any point, that eulogy is now open to some modification, the exception arises from the circumstance that early in life, or, at least, early in his collectorship, he had imbibed from his intercourse with D’Hancarville somewhat of that writer’s love for mystical and supersubtle expositions of the symbolism of the Grecian and Egyptian artists. To D’Hancarville, the least obvious of any two possible expositions of a subject was always the preferable one. Now and then Towneley would fall into the same vein of recondite elaboration; as, for example, when he described his figure of an Egyptian ‘tumbler’ raising himself, upon his arms, from the back of a tame crocodile, as the ‘Genius of Production.’

During the riots of 1780, the Towneley Gallery (like the National Museum of which it was afterwards to become a part) was, for some time, in imminent peril. The Collector himself could have no enemies but those who were infuriated against his religious faith. Fanaticism and ignorance are meet allies, little likely to discriminate between a Towneley Venus and the tawdriest of Madonnas. Threats to destroy the house in Park Street were heard and reported. Mr. Towneley put his gems and medals in a place of safety, together with a few other portable works of art. Then, taking ‘Clytie’ in his arms—with the words ‘I must take care of my wife’—he left his house, casting one last, longing, look at the marbles which, as he feared, would never charm his eyes again. But, happily, both the Towneley house and the British Museum escaped injury, amid the destruction of buildings, and of works of art and literature, in the close neighbourhood of both of them.