Almost equally brief was his subsequent actively official career in England. On the formation of Lord Grenville’s Cabinet (February, 1806), no office was taken by the Premier’s next brother. But on the death of Fox, six months later, he became First Lord of the Admiralty. That office he held until the formation of the Tory Government, in the month of April, 1807. It was too brief a term to give him any adequate opportunity of really evincing his administrative powers. And during almost forty remaining years of life he never took office again, contenting himself with that now nominal function (conferred on him in the year 1800), |The ‘Chief-Justiceship in Eyre,’ south of Trent. 1800–1845.| the ‘Chief-Justiceship in Eyre, to the south of the river Trent,’ of the profits of which, as will be seen presently, he made a noble use. That office in Eyre had once been a function of real gravity and potency. It was still a surviving link between the feudal England of the Henrys and the Edwards, on the one hand, and the industrial England of the Georges on the other. Under a king who could govern, as well as reign, the ‘Chief-Justiceship in Eyre’ might have shown itself, in one particular, to possess a real and precious vitality still. By possibility, the sports of twelfth century and chase-loving monarchs might have been made to alleviate the toils, to brighten the leisure, and to lengthen the lives, of nineteenth-century and hard-toiling artisans. |The Chief-Justiceship in Eyre, and what might have come of its perpetuation.| For in exerting the still legal powers (long dormant, but not abolished) of the forest justiceship, a potent check might have been provided against the profligate, although now common, abuse of the powers entrusted by Parliament to the Board of Woods and Forests. No new legislation was wanted to save many splendid tracts of forest land (over which the Crown then—and as well in 1845, as in 1800—possessed what might have been indestructible ‘forestal rights’), for public enjoyment for ever. Existing laws would have sufficed. But no blame on this score lies at the charge of the then Chief Justice in Eyre. Had Mr. Grenville, for example, ever conceived the idea of using the Forest Laws to preserve for the English people, we will say, Epping Forest, or any other like sylvan tract on this side of Trent, as a ‘People’s Park’ for ever, he would have been laughed at as a Quixote. If Parliament in 1870 is fast becoming alive to the misconduct of those ‘Commissioners’ who have dealt with the Forestal rights of the Crown exactly in the spirit of the pettiest of village shopkeepers, rather than in the spirit of Ministers of State, there was in Mr. Grenville’s time scarcely the faintest whisper of any such conviction of public duty in regard to that matter. Not one Member of Parliament, I think, had ever (at that time) pointed out the gross hypocrisy, as well as the folly, of selling by the hands of one public board and for a few pounds hundreds of acres of ancient and lovely woodlands, and then presently buying, by the hands of another public board, acres of dreary and almost unimprovable barrenness by the expenditure of several thousands of pounds, in order to provide new recreation grounds for ‘public enjoyment!’
Of that forestal Chief-Justiceship Mr. Grenville was the last holder. The office had been established by William the Conqueror. It was abolished by Queen Victoria. One of the chief pursuits of those forty years of retirement which ensued to the founder of the Grenville Library, upon the breaking up of the Grenville Administration of 1806, was book-buying and book-reading. ‘A great part of my Library’—so wrote Mr. Grenville, in 1845—‘has been purchased by the profits of a sinecure office given me by the Public.’ If that sinecure was not and, under the then circumstances, could not have been by its holder’s action or foresight, made the means of preserving for public enjoyment such of the ancient forests as, early in this century, were still intact in beauty, and also lay near to crowded and more or less unhealthy towns, it was at least made the means of giving to the nation a garden for the mind. ‘I feel it,’ continued Mr. Grenville, in his document of 1845, |Will of the Rt. Hon. T. Grenville; Oct., 1845.| ‘to be a debt and a duty that I should acknowledge my obligation by giving the Library so acquired to the British Museum for the use of the Public.’
I have had occasion, already, to mention that many years before his death Mr. Grenville formed a very high estimate of the eminent attainments and still more eminent public services of Sir A. Panizzi. No man had a better opportunity of knowing, intimately, the merits of the then Assistant-Keeper of the printed portion of our National Library. Mr. Grenville showed his estimate in a conclusive and very characteristic way. |Minutes of Inquiry, &c., 1848, and subsequent years, pp. 141, seqq.| He had earnestly supported (in the year 1835) the proposal of a Sub-committee of Trustees that Mr. Panizzi’s early services—more especially in relation to the cataloguing of what are known, at the Museum, as ‘the French Tracts,’ but also as to other labours—should be substantially recognised by an improvement of his salary. At a larger meeting, the recommendation of the smaller sub-committee was cordially adopted in the honorary point of view, but was set virtually aside, in respect to the ‘honorarium,’ That latter step Mr. Grenville so resented that he rose from the table, and never sat at a Trustee meeting again. |Minutes of Evidence, as above.| He many times afterwards visited the Museum; and I well remember the impression made upon my own mind by his noble appearance, at almost ninety years of age, on one of the latest of those visits—not very long before his death. But in the Committee Room he never once sat, during the last eleven years of his life.
The fact being so, Readers unfamiliar with the ‘blue-books’ will learn without surprise that a conversation between Mr. Grenville and Mr. Panizzi, in Hamilton Place, was the prelude to his noble public gift of 1846. That conversation took place in the autumn of 1845. |Ibid.; and comp. p. 780 of the Minutes of 1849.| He, in the course of it, assured Mr. Panizzi (by that time at the head of the Printed Book Department) of his settled purpose, and evinced a desire that his Library should be preserved apart from the mass of the National Collection. He then remarked, ‘You will have a great many duplicate books, and you will sell them,’ speaking in a tone of inquiry. ‘No,’ replied Panizzi, the ‘Trustees will never sell books that are given to them.’ Mr. Grenville rejoined with an evident relief of mind, ‘Well, so much the better.’ Long afterwards, when visiting Mr. Panizzi in his private study, he asked the question—‘Where are you going to put my books? I see your rooms are already full.’ He was taken to the long, capacious, but certainly not very sightly, ‘slip,’ contrived by Sir R. Smirke on the eastern outskirt of the noble King’s Library. |See the Plan, hereafter.| ‘Well,’ was the Keeper’s reply, ‘if we can’t do better, we will put them here; and, as you see, my room is close by. Here, for a time, they will at least be under my own eye,’ The good and generous book-lover went away with a smile on his genial face, well assured that his books would be gratefully cared for.
Mr. Grenville died on the 17th of December, 1846. On the day of his death it chanced that the present writer was engaged on a review-article about the history of the Museum Library. Ere many days were past it was his pleasant task to add a paragraph—the first that was written on the subject—respecting the new gift to the Public. But an accident delayed the publication of that article until the following summer.
Meanwhile, the final day of the reception of the books—a dreary, snowy day of the close of February—was, to us of the Museum Library, a sort of holiday within-doors. Very little work was done that day; but many choice rarities in literature, and some in art, were eagerly examined. All who survive will remember it as I do. To lovers of books, such a day was like a glimpse of summer sunshine interposed in the thick of winter.
To tell what little can here be told of the history and character of the Grenville Library in other words than in those well-considered and appropriate words which were employed by the man who had had so much delightful intercourse with the Collector himself, and to whom belongs a part of the merit of the gift, would be an impertinence. |Panizzi’s account of some of the choicest books in the Grenville Library.| In his report on the accessions of the year 1847, Mr. Panizzi wrote thus:—‘It would naturally be expected that one of the editors of the “Adelphi Homer” would lose no opportunity of collecting the best and rarest editions of the Prince of Poets. Æsop, a favourite author of Mr. Grenville, occurs in his Library in its rarest forms; there is no doubt that the series of editions of this author in that Library is unrivalled. The great admiration which Mr. Grenville felt for Cardinal Ximenes, even more on account of the splendid edition of the Polyglot Bible which that prelate caused to be printed at Alcala, than of his public character, made him look upon the acquisition of the Moschus, a book of extreme rarity, as a piece of good fortune. Among the extremely rare editions of the Latin Classics, in which the Grenville Library abounds, the unique complete copy of Azzoguidi’s first edition of Ovid is a gem well deserving particular notice, and was considered on the whole, by Mr. Grenville himself, the boast of his collection. The Aldine Virgil of 1505, the rarest of the Aldine editions of this poet, is the more welcome to the Museum as it serves to supply a lacuna; the copy mentioned in the Catalogue of the Royal Collection not having been transferred to the National Library.
‘The rarest editions of English Poets claimed and obtained the special attention of Mr. Grenville. Hence we find him possessing not only the first and second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales by Caxton, but the only copy known of an hitherto undiscovered edition of the same work printed in 1498, by Wynkyn de Worde. Of Shakespeare’s collected Dramatic Works, the Grenville Library contains a copy of the first edition, which, if not the finest known, is at all events surpassed by none. His strong religious feelings and his sincere attachment to the Established Church, as well as his knowledge and mastery of the English language, concurred in making him eager to possess the earliest as well as the rarest editions of the translations of the Scriptures in the vernacular tongue. |Panizzi’s Report, in the Annual Returns of 1847, passim.| He succeeded to a great extent; but what deserves particular mention is the only known fragment of the New Testament in English, translated by Tyndale and Roy, which was in the press of Quentell, at Cologne, in 1525, when the translators were obliged to interrupt the printing, and fly to escape persecution.
‘The History of the British Empire, and whatever could illustrate any of its different portions, were the subject of Mr. Grenville’s unremitting research, and he allowed nothing to escape him deserving to be preserved, however rare and expensive. Hence his collection of works on the Divorce of Henry VIII; that of Voyages and Travels, either by Englishmen, or to countries at some time more or less connected with England, or possessed by her; that of contemporary works on the gathering, advance, and defeat of the “Invincible Armada;” and that of writings on Ireland;—are more numerous, more valuable, and more interesting, than in any other collection ever made by any person on the same subjects. Among the Voyages and Travels, the collections of De Bry and Hulsius are the finest in the world; no other Library can boast of four such fine books as the copies of Hariot’s Virginia, in Latin, German, French, and English, of the De Bry series. And it was fitting that in Mr. Grenville’s Library should be found one of the only two copies known of the first edition of this work, printed in London in 1588, wherein an account is given of a colony which had been founded by his family namesake. Sir Richard Grenville.
‘Conversant with the Language and Literature of Spain, as well as with that of Italy, the works of imagination by writers of those two countries are better represented in his Library than in any other out of Spain and Italy; in some branches better even than in any single Library in the countries themselves. No Italian collection can boast of such a splendid series of early editions of Ariosto’s Orlando, one of Mr. Grenville’s favourite authors, nor, indeed, of such choice Romance Poems. The copy of the first edition of Ariosto is not to be matched for beauty; of that of Rome, 1533, even the existence was hitherto unknown. A perfect copy of the first complete edition of the Morgante Maggiore, of 1482, was also not known to exist before Mr. Grenville succeeded in procuring his. Among the Spanish Romances, the copy of that of Tirant lo Blanch, printed at Valencia, in 1490, is as fine, as clean, and as white, as when it first issued from the press; and no second copy of this edition of a work professedly translated from English into Portuguese, and thence into Valencian, is known to exist except in the Library of the Sapienza, at Rome.
‘But where there is nothing common, it is almost depreciating a collection to enumerate a few articles as rare. It is a marked feature of this Library, that Mr. Grenville did not collect mere bibliographical rarities. He never aimed at having a complete set of the editions from the press of Caxton or Aldus; but Chaucer and Gower by Caxton were readily purchased, as well as other works which were desirable on other accounts, besides that of having issued from the press of that printer; and, when possible, select copies were procured. Some of the rarest, and these the finest, Aldine editions were purchased by him, for the same reasons. The Horæ in Greek, printed by Aldus in 16º, in 1497, is a volume which, from its language, size, and rarity, is of the greatest importance for the literary and religious history of the time when it was printed. It is therefore in Mr. Grenville’s Library. The Virgil of 1501 is not only an elegant book, but it is the first book printed with that peculiar Italic, known as Aldine, and the first volume which Aldus printed, “forma enchiridii,” as he called it, being expressly adapted to give poor scholars the means of purchasing for a small sum the works of the classical writers. This also is, therefore, among Mr. Grenville’s books; and of one of the two editions of Virgil, both dated the same year, 1514, he purchased a large paper copy, because it was the more correct of the two.
‘It was the merit of the work, the elegance of the volume, the “genuine” condition of the copy, &c., which together determined Mr. Grenville to purchase books printed on vellum, of which he collected nearly a hundred. He paid a very large sum for a copy of the Furioso of 1532, not because it was “on ugly vellum,” as he very properly designated it, but because, knowing the importance of such an edition of such a work, and never having succeeded in procuring it on paper, he would rather have it on expensive terms and “ugly vellum,” than not at all.
‘By the bequest of Mr. Grenville’s Library, the collection of books printed on vellum now at the Museum, and comprising those formerly presented by George II, George III, and Mr. Cracherode, is believed to surpass that of any other National Library, except the King’s Library at Paris, of which Van Praet justly speaks with pride, and all foreign competent and intelligent judges with envy and admiration. In justice to the Grenville Library, the list of all its vellum books ought to be here inserted. As this cannot be done, some only of the most remarkable shall be mentioned. These are—the Greek Anthology of 1494; the Book of Hawking of Juliana Berners of 1496; the first edition of the Bible, known as the “Mazarine Bible,” printed at Mentz about 1454; the Aldine Dante of 1502; the first Rationale of Durandus of 1459; the first edition of Fisher On the Psalms, of 1508; the Aldine Horace, Juvenal, Martial, and Petrarca, of 1501; the Livy of 1469; the Primer of Salisbury, printed in Paris in 1531; the Psalter of 1457, which supplies the place of the one now at Windsor, which belonged to the Royal Collection before it was transferred to the British Museum; the Sforziada, by Simoneta, of 1490, a most splendid volume even in so splendid a Library; the Theuerdank of 1517; the Aulus Gellius and the Vitruvius of Giunta, printed in 1515, &c. &c. Of this identical copy of Vitruvius, formerly Mr. Dent’s, the author of the Bibliographical Decameron wrote, “Let the enthusiastic admirers of a genuine vellum Junta—of the amplest size and in spotless condition—resort to the choice cabinet of Mr. Dent for such a copy of this edition of Vitruvius and Frontinus.” |Panizzi’s Report to Parliament, as above.| The Aulus Gellius is in its original state, exactly as it was when presented to Lorenzo de’ Medici, afterwards Duke of Urbino, to whom the edition was dedicated.’
‘Amidst tablets and stones, inscribed with the straight and angular characters of the Runic alphabet, and similar articles which the vulgar might have connected with the exercise of the forbidden arts, ... were disposed, in great order, several of those curious stone axes, formed of green granite, which are often found in these Islands.... There were, moreover, to be seen amid the strange collection stone sacrificial knives ... and the brazen implements called Celts, the purpose of which has troubled the repose of so many antiquaries.’—The Pirate, c. xxviii.
‘A Museum of Antiquities—not of one People or period only, but of all races and all times—exhibits a vast comparative scheme of the material productions of man. We are thus enabled to follow the progress of the Fine and Useful Arts, contemporaneously through a long period of time, tracing their several lines backwards till they converge at one vanishing point of the unknown Past.’—
Scantiness of the Notices of some Contributors to the Natural-History Collections, and its cause.—The Duke of Blacas and his Museum of Greek and Roman Antiquities.—Hugh Cuming and his Travels and Collections in South America.—John Rutter Chorley, and his Collection of Spanish Plays and Spanish Poetry.—George Witt and his Collections illustrative of the History of Obscure Superstitions.—The Ethnographical Museum of Henry Christy, and its History.—Colonial Archæologists and British Consuls: The History of the Woodhouse Collection, and of its transmittal to the British Museum.—Lord Napier and the acquisition of the Abyssinian MSS. added in 1868.—The Travels of Von Siebold in Japan, and the gathering of his Japanese Library.—Felix Slade and his Bequests, Artistic and Archæological.
No reader of this volume will, in the course of its perusal, have become more sensible than is its author of a want of due proportion, in those notices which have occasionally been given of some eminent naturalists who have conspicuously contributed to the public collections, as compared with the notices of those many archæologists and book-gatherers who, in common with the naturalists, have been fellow-workers towards the building up of our National Museum. |The inadequacy of the notices of naturalists in this volume, and its cause.| I feel, too, that my own ignorance of natural history is no excuse at all for so imperfect a filling-out of the plan which the title-page itself of this volume implies. I feel this all the more strongly, because I dissent entirely from those views which tend to depreciate the importance of the scientific collections, in order (very superfluously) to enhance that of the literary and artistic collections. Far from looking at the splendid Galleries of mammals, or of birds, or of plants, as mere collections of ‘book-plates,’ gathered for the ‘illustration’ of the National Library, or from sharing the opinion that the books and the antiquities, alone, are ‘what may be called the permanent departments of the British Museum’ (to quote, literally, the words of a publication[45] issued whilst this sheet is going to press, words which seem somewhat rashly—considering whence they come—to prejudge a question of national scope, and one which it assuredly belongs alone to Parliament to settle), I regard these scientific collections as possessing, in common with the others, the highest educational value, and as also possessing, even a little beyond some of the others, a special claim, it may be, upon the respect of Englishmen.
That speciality of claim seems to me to accrue from the fact, that two of the early Founders, and one of the most conspicuous subsequent Benefactors of the Museum, were pre-eminently Naturalists. Such was Courten. Such was Sloane. Such was Sir Joseph Banks. I shall have erred greatly in my estimate of the regard habitually paid by a British Parliament to the memory of the eminent benefactors of Britain, if, in the issue, it do not become apparent that such a consideration as this will weigh heavily with those who will shortly—and after due deliberation and debate—have to decide pending questions in relation to the enlargement and to the still further improvement of the British Museum.
Be that however as it ultimately shall prove to be, if the Public should honour this volume with a favourable reception, it will be its author’s endeavour (in a second edition) to supplement, by the knowledge and co-operation of others, the ignorance and the deficiencies of which he is very conscious in himself.
In resuming the notices connected with the now truly magnificent Collection of Antiquities, we have to glance at the organizing of a new ‘Department’ in the Museum. During at least two generations it has been, from time to time, remarked—with some surprise as well as censure—that the ‘British’ Museum contained no ‘British’ Antiquities. Sometimes this criticism has been put much too strongly, as when, for example, one of the recent biographers of Wedgwood thus wrote (in 1866, but referring also to a period then ninety years distant). ‘At that date, as at present, everything native to the soil, or produced by the races who had lived and died upon it, was repudiated by those who were the rulers of the National Collection.’ |Meteyard, Life of Josiah Wedgwood, vol. ii, p. 162.| At that time, assuredly, there were already in the Museum a good many British beasts, British birds, and British books;—no inconsiderable part of the ‘productions’ of our soil and of the races born and nurtured upon it.
But, within a few months after the appearance of the criticism I have quoted, all ground for its repetition was removed by the formation of the ‘Department of British and Mediæval Antiquities and Ethnography.’ It is thus organized, in six separate sections:—
To the enrichment of the fourth section of this new department of the Museum (in a small degree), as well as (much more largely) to that of the Classical Collections, the choice treasures gathered in France during two generations by successive Dukes of Blacas largely contributed.
The first of these Dukes, Peter Lewis John Casimir de Blacas, was born at Aulps in the year 1770. He was of a family which has been conspicuous in Provence from the beginning of the Crusades. Attaining manhood just at the eve of the Revolution, the Duke followed the French princes into exile, and warmly attached himself to Lewis the Eighteenth, to whom, in after years, he became the minister of predilection, as distinguished from that monarch’s many ministers of constraint. He had, in his own day, the reputation of being a courtier; but seems to have been, in truth, an honest, frank, and outspeaking adviser. One saying of his depicts quite plainly the nature of the man, and also the nature of the work he had to do:—“If you want to defend your Crown, you musn’t run away from your Kingdom.” Those words were spoken in 1815; and, as we all know, were spoken in vain.
A statesman of that stamp—one who does not watch and chronicle the shiftings of popular opinion, in order to know with certainty what are his own opinions, or in order to shape his own political ‘principles’—rarely enjoys popularity. De Blacas became so little popular at home, that the King was forced to send him, for many years, abroad. At Rome, he negotiated the Concordat (1817–19); at Naples, he advised an amnesty (1822), together with other measures, some of which were too wise for the latitude. In the interval between his two residences at the Court of Naples, he took part in the Congress of Laybach.
The opportunities afforded by diplomacy in Italy and in other countries were turned to intellectual and archæological, as well as to political, account. He imitated the example of Hamilton and of Elgin, and that of a crowd of his own countrymen, long anterior to either. Since his son’s death, the British Museum has, by purchase, entered into his archæological labours almost as largely—in their way and measure—as it has inherited the treasures of its own enlightened ambassadors at Naples and at Constantinople.
The Duke died at Goeritz in 1839. Nine years earlier, he had advised Charles X against the measures which precipitated that king into ruin; and when the obstinate monarch had to pay the sure penalty of neglecting good advice, the giver of it voluntarily took his share of the infliction. He offered to attend Charles into exile in 1830, as he had attended him forty years before, when in the flush of youth. He lies buried at the King’s feet, in the Church of the Franciscans at Goeritz—
The late Duke of Blacas augmented his father’s collections by many purchases of great extent and value. His special predilection was for coins and gems. In that department the combined museum of father and son soon came to rank as the finest known collection, belonging to an individual possessor. It includes seven hundred and forty-eight ancient and classical cameos and intaglios, and two hundred and three others which are either mediæval, oriental, or modern. The most precious portion of the Strozzi cabinet passed into it, as did also a choice part of the collections, respectively, of Barth and of De la Turbie. The Blacas Museum is also eminently rich in vases and paintings of various kinds; in sculptures, on every variety of material; in terracottas, and in ancient glass. Its ‘silver toilet service’ of a Christian Roman lady of the fifth century, named Projecta, has been made famous throughout Europe by the descriptive accounts which have appeared from the pen of Visconti and from that of Labarte. The casket is richly chased with figure-subjects. Among them are seen figures of Venus and Cupid; of the lady herself and of her bridegroom, Secundus. Roman bridesmaids, of indubitable flesh and blood, are mingled with the more unsubstantial forms of Nereids, riding upon Tritons.
Of the men devoted, in our own day, to the enchaining pursuits of Natural History, few better deserve a competent biographer than does Hugh Cuming, whose career, in its relation to the Museum history, has an additional interest for us from the circumstance that his course in life was partly shaped by his having attracted, in childhood, the notice of another worthy naturalist and public benefactor, |See page 376.| Colonel George Montagu, of Lackham.
Young Cuming’s childish fondness for picking up shells and gathering plants attracted Colonel Montagu’s notice about the time that the boy was apprenticed to a sailmaker, living not far from the boy’s native village, West Alvington, in Devon. The elder naturalist fostered the nascent passion of his young and humble imitator, and the trade of sailmaking brought Cuming, whilst still a boy, into contact with sailors. The benevolent and Nature-loving Colonel told the youngster some of the fairy tales of science; the tars spun yarns for him about the marvels of foreign parts. A few, and very few, years of work at his trade at home were followed by a voyage to South America. At Valparaiso he resumed his handicraft, but only as a step (by aid of frugality and foresight) towards saving enough of money to enable him to devote his whole being to conchology and to botany. Seven years of work under this inspiring ambition, seem to have enabled the man of five-and-thirty to retire from business, and to build himself a yacht. But his was to be no lounging yachtman’s life; it was rather to resemble the life of an A.B. before the mast. The year 1827 was spent in toiling and dredging, to good purpose, amongst the islands of the South Pacific. When he returned to Valparaiso, the retired sailmaker found that he had won fame, as well as many precious rarities in conchology and botany. The Chilian Government gave him special privileges and useful credentials. He then devoted two years to the thorough exploration of the coasts extending from Chiloë to the Gulf of Conchagua. |Athenæum of 1865; Returns presented to Parliament, v. y.| He botanized in plains, marshes and woods; he turned over shingle, and explored the crannies of the cliffs, with the patient endurance of a Californian gold-digger, and was much happier in his companions. In 1831, he returned to England, with a modest but assured livelihood, and with inexhaustible treasures in shells and plants, of which multitudes were theretofore unseen and unknown in Europe.
The year 1831 was a happy epoch for a conchologist. The Zoological Society had just gained a firm footing. Broderip and Sowerby were ready to exhibit and to describe the rich shells of the Pacific. Richard Owen was eager to anatomize the molluscs, and to write their biography. Some of the novelties brought over by Cuming in 1831 were still yielding new information thirty years afterwards; probably are yielding it still.
In 1835, Mr. Cuming returned to America. He devoted four years to an exhaustive survey of the natural history—more especially, but far from exclusively, the conchology and the botany—of the Philippine group of islands, of Malacca, Singapore, and St. Helena.
Cuming was fitted for his work not more by his scientific ardour and his patient toil-bearing, than by his amiable character. He loved children. His manner was so attractive to them that in some places to which he travelled a schoolful of children were extemporised into botanic missionaries. The joyous band would turn out for a holiday, and would spend the whole of it in searching for the plants, the shells, and the insects, with the general forms and appearances of which the promoter and rewarder of their voluntary labours had previously familiarised them. He returned to England with such a collection of shells as no previous investigator had brought home; and with about one hundred and thirty thousand specimens of dried plants, besides many curious specimens in other departments.
His collections had been a London marvel before he set out on his third voyage of discovery. He then possessed, I believe, almost sixteen thousand species, and they were regarded as a near approximation to a perfect collection, according to the knowledge of the time. |Comp. Athenæum as above, and the Museum returns of 1865 and subsequent years.| If the writer of the able notice of him which the Athenæum published immediately after his death was rightly informed, Cuming nearly doubled that number by the results of his final voyage, and by those of subsequent purchases made in Europe.
Very naturally, strenuous efforts were made to ensure the perpetuity of this noble collection during its owner’s lifetime. The history of those efforts still deserves to be told, and for more than one reason. But it cannot be told here. This inadequate notice of a most estimable man must close with the few words which, three years ago, closed Professor Owen’s annual Report on the Progress of the Zoological Portion of the British Museum. ‘The discoveries and labours of Mr. Hugh Cuming,’ he then wrote, ‘do honour to his country; the fruition of them by Naturalists of all countries now depends mainly on the acquisition of the space required for the due arrangement, exhibition—facility of access and comparison—of the rarities which the Nation has acquired.’ And then he adds a small individual instance, as a passing illustration of the value of Mr. Cuming’s life-long pursuit—‘Among the choicer rarities, ... brought from the Philippines in 1840, was a specimen of siliceous sponge (described and figured in the Transactions of the Zoological Society), known as Euplectella Aspergillum.’ Up to the date of Mr. Cuming’s death (tenth August, 1865), this specimen—of what, for non-zoological readers, may be likened to a sort of coral of rare beauty—brought over in 1840, was unique. |Transactions, &c., vol. iii, p. 203.| In the year next after the discoverer’s death, many fine and curious specimens were sent from the Philippines. The solitary explorer of 1839 had at length been followed by a school of explorers. Such men as Cuming live after their death, and hence the marvellous increase, within a very few years, in our knowledge of Nature, and of God’s bounty to the world he made.
By a man who did but little in literature, although he possessed attainments which, in some respects, seem to have surpassed those of a good many men whose lucubrations have had much publicity and vogue, a valuable addition was made a few years ago, by bequest, to the Museum Library, both in the printed and manuscript departments. |Will of Mr. Rutter Chorley, 1866.| Mr. John Rutter Chorley had collected about two hundred volumes of the Spanish poetry and drama, and had enriched them with manuscript notes, bibliographical and critical. He had also prepared chronological tables of the dramatists—writing them in Spanish, of which he was a master—together with an account of their respective works. He had, I think, contemplated, at some future time, the preparation of some such book on the Spanish theatre as that published by Mr. Ticknor, many years ago, on Spanish literature at large. Whether the appearance of Ticknor’s valuable book deterred Mr. Chorley from prosecuting his purpose, I know not. Probably he was one of the many men the very extent of whose knowledge inspires a fastidiousness which prompts them to keep on increasing their private store, and to defer, almost until death overtakes them, the drawing from that store for the Public. If there may really, by some dim possibility, have been here and there an inglorious Hampden, or a mute Shakespeare, it is very certain that there have been, in literary history and in like departments of human study, many an unknown Disraeli, many a Tom Warton, brimful of knowledge about poets and poetry, who never could have lived long enough to put to public use the materials he had laboriously brought together.
Of another Collector, whose pursuits lay at an opposite pole to those of Mr. Chorley, it would not be edifying to say very much in these pages. Some among the collections illustrative of the history of obscure superstitions (to quote the polite euphuism of one of the Museum Returns to Parliament) partake, in a degree, of the peculiar associations which connect themselves with the bare name of a place at which some few of them were really found—that too famous retreat of the Emperor Tiberius. Others of them, however, possess a real archæological value from a different point of view. All, no doubt, are characteristically illustrative, more or less, of the doings ‘in the dark places of the earth,’ and may point a moral, howsoever little fitted to adorn a tale.
Mr. George Witt, F.R.S., the collector of these curiosities of human error, was a surgeon who had lived much in Australia, and who, on his return from the Colonies, had retired to a provincial town in England, where, at first, he amused his leisure by gathering a small museum of natural history. Of that collection I remember to have seen a printed catalogue, but I imagine that he sold it in his lifetime, as no part of his objects of natural history came, with his other and much more eccentric museum, to the augmentation of the public stores. Towards the close of his life he lived in London, and used to amuse himself by exhibiting, and by lecturing upon, what he regarded as the more racy portion of his later collections. He chose (I am told) the hour of eleven o’clock on Sunday morning for such peculiar expositions, but I do not think that these ‘Sunday Lectures’ were regarded, either by the man who gave them or by his auditors, as especially fitted for ‘the instruction of the working classes.’
Of a very different calibre to Mr. George Witt was the donor of the noble Museum of Ethnography which, for want of room at Bloomsbury, still occupies the late donor’s dwelling-house, almost two miles off. It is not too much to say of Henry Christy, that he was both an illustrious man of science and an eminent Christian. The man whose fame as a searcher into antiquity is spread alike over Europe and America, is also remembered in many Irish cabins as one who was willing to spend, lavishly, his health and strength, as well as his money, in lifting up, from squalid beds of straw and filth, poor creatures stricken at once with famine and with fever, and so stricken as sometimes to have almost lost the semblance of humanity. He is also remembered by Algerian peasants, by West African negroes, and by Canadian Indians for like deeds of beneficence. When Prussian insolence and Prussian barbarity struck down Danes who were defending hearth and home, Christy was again the open-handed benefactor of the oppressed. When Turks were, in like manner, beating down by sheer brute force the Druses of Syria, Henry Christy was relieving the distressed and the down-trodden in the East, with no less liberality than he had evinced a little while before in relieving them in the North of Europe.
The time which works of good-samaritanism such as these left unoccupied was given to a vast series—or rather to a succession of series—of explorations which have had already a noble result, and which will yield more and more fruit for many a year to come. The scene of them embraced Mexico, the United States, British America, Denmark, and several Departments of Southern and Western France. Their period reached from 1860—when he had just entered the fiftieth year of his age—almost to the day of his lamented and sudden death in the May of 1865. His able and beloved friend and fellow-worker Lartet was with him in the Allier, when the fatal illness struck him, at the age of fifty-four. It will be pardoned me, I trust, if in this connection I quote, once again, those thoughtful words, out of the private note-book of Lord Bacon, which I applied in a former chapter to another and more recent public loss—‘Princes, ... when men deserve crowns for their performances, do not crown them below, where the deeds are performed, but call them up. So doth God, by death.’