The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lives of the Founders of the British Museum, Part I, by Edward Edwards

33. It has been estimated, on competent evidence, that for every one thousand pounds which the Earl’s estates in England contributed towards his personal and household expenditure, in exile, twenty-seven thousand pounds were so contributed towards the maintenance, in one form or other, of the royalist cause. Such an estimate can, of course, only be approximative. But it has obvious significance and value.

34. See the details in Lords’ Report on Gregg’s case; reprinted in State Trials, vol. xiv, cols. 1378 seqq.

35. In the interval between June, 1707 (after the Union with Scotland), and February, 1708, the following entries occur in the Council Books:—

‘1 July, 1707. The Rt. Hon. Robert Harley, one of Her Majesty’s principal Secretaries of State, delivered up the old signet of office—which was thereupon broken before Her Majesty—and received a new one by the Queen’s command.’ The entry is followed by the note:—‘This order was thus drawn by Mr. Harley’s particular direction.’ (Register of Privy Council, Anne, vol. iii, p. 395.)

‘8 January, 170⅞. The Rt. Hon. R. Harley, ... having this day presented to Her Majesty in her Privy Council a new signet with supporters, Her Majesty was pleased to deliver it back to him, whereupon he returned to Her Majesty the old signet, which was immediately defaced,’ &c. (Ib., p. 485.)

36. Swift’s account of their first interview after Harley’s partial recovery merits quotation:—‘I went in the evening,’ he notes on the 5th of April, ‘to see Mr. Harley. Mr. Secretary was just going out of the door, but I made him come back; and there was the old Saturday club, Lord Keeper [Harcourt], Lord Rivers, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Harley, and I; the first time since his stabbing. Mr. Secretary went away, but I stayed till nine, and made Mr. Harley show me his breast and tell all his story.... I measured and found that the penknife would have killed him, if it had gone but half the breadth of my thumb-nail lower; so near was he to death. I was so curious as to ask him what were his thoughts while they were carrying him home in the chair. He said he concluded himself a dead man.’—Journal to Stella, as before, pp. 255, 256.

37. The original letters of the Elector to Harley are in Lansdowne MS. 1236, ff. 272–294. They range, in date, from 15 December, 1710, to 15 June, 1714. There also are several letters (in autograph) of the Electress Sophia. The earliest of these bears date 26 May, 1707. The latest is undated, but was written in May, 1714, very few days before the writer’s death.

38. The chief passages in the Stuart Correspondence upon which a confident assertion has been based of his ultimate complicity in the Jacobite conspiracies are given, textually, in a note at the end of this chapter.

39. Thus, for example, at one stage of the proceedings before the Privy Council about Barbadoes, we find the Lord Keeper Coventry reporting to the Board upon an order of reference: ‘I am of opinion that Barbadoes is not one of the Caribbee Islands.... But ... I am also of opinion that the proof on Lord Carlisle’s part that Barbadoes was intended to be passed in his Patent is very strong.’—Colonial Papers, April 18, 1629, vol. v, § 11. See also The King to Wolverton, Ib., § 13.

40. His eldest son, Peter Courten, had married a daughter of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, and died without issue. Sir William Courten bought the widow’s jointure of £1200 a year by the present payment of £10,000, according to a statement in MS. Sloane, 3515.

41. ‘Hoc excepto quod scilicet qui se jacturam passos dicunt in duabus navibus ... poterunt litem inceptam prosequi.’—Treaty of Commerce of 1662.

42. After elaborate inquiries in the Admiralty Court the losses were certified as amounting to £151,612; and that assessment was adopted in a subsequent Commission under the Great Seal.

43. This, of course, is the statement, ex parte, of the claimants.

44. This allusion I am unable to explain. It is quite an exceptional phrase in the Courten correspondence. But, possibly, ‘station’ may be understood as meaning merely place of residence.

45. This volume undoubtedly passed into the Sloane Collection, but is not so described as to be identified quite satisfactorily.

46. The fact is unquestionably so, although upon his tomb it is said that his age was sixty-two years, eleven months, and twenty-eight days. The same inaccurate statement occurs also—and more than once—in papers written by Sir Hans Sloane. Courten was born on the 28th March, 1642. There is an entry of his baptism in the Register of St. Gabriel, Fenchurch, on the 31st of the same month; and a copy of it in MS. Sloane, 3515, fol. 53.

47. Staphorst was, by birth, a German. He is known in English literature as the translator of Rauwolf’s Travels in Asia. This task he undertook upon Sloane’s recommendation.

48. As, for example, under the words ‘Lapathum;’ Poonnacai Malabarorum; ‘Ricinus;’ ‘Salix;’ and several others. See Almagesti Botanici Mantissa, pp. 113; 143; 161; 165, &c.

49. Dr. Arthur Charlett’s long and intimate correspondence with Sir Hans Sloane began in this year (1696), and continued without interruption until 1720. It has much interest, and fills MS. Sloane 4040, from f. 193 to f. 285. That with John Chamberlayne was of nearly equal duration, and is preserved in the same volume (ff. 100–167). The correspondence with James Bobart contains much valuable material for the history of botanical study in England, and is preserved in MS. Sloane, 4037 (ff. 158–185). It began in 1685, and was continued until Bobart’s death, in 1716. Still more curious is the correspondence with John Burnet (1722–1738), who was originally a surgeon in the service of the East India Company, and afterwards Surgeon to the King of Spain. Burnet’s letters to Sloane, written from Madrid, contain valuable illustrations of Spanish society and manners as they were in the first half of the Eighteenth Century. This correspondence is in MS. Sloane, 4039.

50. History of Europe [the precursor of the Annual Register], for 1712.

51. ‘Here are great designs on foot for uniting the Queen’s Library, the Cotton, and the Royal Society’s, together. How soon they may be put in practice time must discover.’—Sloane to Dr. Charlett, Master of University College, April, 1707.

52. Besides those distinctions which I have noted already, he had been requested, in 1730, by the University of Oxford, to allow his portrait to be placed in the University Gallery. In 1733 his statue, by Rysbraeck, was placed in the Botanic Garden at Chelsea.

53. ‘Walpole is your tyrant to-day; and any man His Majesty pleases to name—Horace or Leheup—may be so to-morrow.’—Bolingbroke to Marchmont, 22 July, 1739.

54. ‘Our House of Commons—mere poachers—are piddling with the torture of Leheup, who extracted so much money out of the Lottery.’—Horace Walpole to Richard Bentley, 19 December, 1753.

55. The term ‘Librarian,’ as used at the British Museum, has never implied any special connection with the Books, printed or manuscript. All the Keepers of Departments were, originally, called ‘Under Librarian.’ The General Superintendent or Warden has always been called ‘Principal Librarian.’

56. One of Cook’s many individual gifts was the first Kangaroo ever brought into Europe.

57. In a copy of this work now before me, the original drawings are bound up with the engravings, and later drawings are added. They serve to show that Sir William’s scientific interest in the subject lasted as long as his life.

58. That superiority, however, is only partial. The original Naples edition, along with many errors, contains much valuable matter omitted in the reprint.

59. I find that in this statement—made twenty-four years after the date of the transaction referred to—Sir William’s memory misled him. The amount of the Parliamentary vote was (as I have stated it, on a previous page) eight thousand four hundred pounds.

60. This John Towneley was sent first to Chester Castle, then to the Marshalsea in Southwark, then to York Castle, and to a block-house in Hull. From Yorkshire he was sent to the Gatehouse at Westminster, and thence to a jail in Manchester. From his Lancashire prison he was presently hustled into Oxfordshire, and sent thence to another prison at Ely. The gallant old recusant survived it all, to die at Towneley at last.

61. Lancastrian for ‘throw open.’

62. Specimens of Ancient Sculpture. Published by the Society of Dilettanti, Preface, § 61.

63. One of the metopes from the south side of the Parthenon, removed by the Count de Choiseul, during his embassy at the eve of the Revolution, was captured by an English ship when on its way to France, and had been purchased by Lord Elgin at a Custom House sale in London. By him it was returned to Choiseul, with a liberality too rare in such matters. When this metope came, after Choiseul’s death, to be sold at Paris, by auction, the Trustees of the British Museum sent a commission for its purchase. The commissioner went so far as to offer a thousand pounds, but was overbidden by the French Government.

64. Curse of Minerva, passim.

65. That my needful abridgment, in the text, of Mr. Payne Knight’s words may not misrepresent his meaning, I subjoin the whole of the passage:—‘Had this powerful engine of influence’ [namely, loss of caste] ‘been employed in favour of pure morality and efficient virtue, the Hindoos might have been the most virtuous and happy of the human race. But the ambition of a hierarchy has, as usual, employed it to serve its own particular interests instead of those of the community in general.... Should the pious labours of our missionaries succeed in diffusing among them a more pure and more moral, but less uniform and less energetic system of religion, they may improve and exalt the character of individual men, but they will for ever destroy the repose and tranquillity of the mass.... The prevalence of European religion will be the fall of European domination.... The incarnations which form the principal subject of sculpture in all the temples of India, Tibet, Tartary, and China, are, above all others, calculated to call forth the ideal perfections of the art, by expanding and exalting the imagination of the artist, and exciting his ambition to surpass the simple imitation of ordinary forms, in order to produce a model of excellence, worthy to be the corporeal habitation of the Deity. But this no nation of the East, nor indeed of the Earth, except the Greeks and those who copied them, ever attempted.’—Analytical Inquiry, &c., p. 80.]