and throughout our vast empire, and into what can be learned from or suggested by foreign nations. For such a task, men of trained intelligence and the gift of clear and vivid expression will be needed; and it may be that to a National Institute an English government will turn to supply then, just as successive French governments have so applied to the French Institute, and more particularly to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Even as

it is, compare a report by Mr. Tremenhere-brief, lucid, suggestive, conclusive

-on a mining district or a baking trade with an average blue-book-rudis indigestaque moles entombing the thousands upon thousands of questions and answers produced by a select committee of the House of Commons and the cloud of witnesses which it examines-the useful and the useless jumbled together in inextricable confusion, and yielding frequently no result of any kind-for how often is the committee's report rendered colourless and neutral by the disagreement of its members? Tell me in what parliamentary or official document or statement-and there have been very many tons of them printed -the relations between Europeans and natives in our Indian empire have received as much light and been made as clearly and generally intelligible as in the few letters which Mr. Wingrove Cook despatched from Bengal when returning home from his newspapermission to China, or in the communications with which a "Competition Wallah" at once entertains and instructs the readers of Macmillan's Magazine.

Per

Such possible results, however, of the existence of a National Institute, recognized and honoured by the State, perhaps belong to a rather distant future. haps, too, even although the suggestion of it comes from Lord Stanhope, a British Institute will not be founded until after many years. Yet even now, and without the creation of any new body, the claims of eminent men of letters could be partly recognised by entrusting them with useful, honourable, and dignified functions, which No. 53.-VOL. IX.

might in time develop into a government and direction of their distinguished juniors. Some years ago an Edinburgh Reviewer, discussing the subject of an Order of Merit, for the reward and recognition of men eminent in literature and science, made the following remarks, which, from one point of view, have a certain truth and pertinence :-" An "order created solely," he said, "for men of science and letters, as has been 66 more than once suggested, would wholly fail in its object. There is no reason why they should be separated "from others who deserve well of their

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country. On the contrary, it is to "amalgamate them with their fellow"citizens in honours as in labours that we desire, and to suffer them to rank "(when their reputation so entitles them) with whomsoever be the other "claimants to social consideration. "There is not a city knight who would "not jest at an order consisting only of authors, to whose united rent-roll he "would prefer even half-a-dozen railway debentures. If any practical "honours ever be accorded to authors, philosophers, or artists, agreeably to "the usual principles of our aristocratic "monarchy, we fear, strange though it

may appear to say, that they must be "honours shared with dukes and earls, "ambassadors and generals.' "" 1 Now, there is one body, fulfilling all the requirements of the Edinburgh Reviewer, and to which eminent men of letters have belonged, do belong, and are entitled to belong in much more considerable numbers than at present. I mean the Board of so-called Trustees which governs our great national institution, the British Museum.

The British Museum is supported wholly by the British nation, and the British Parliament possesses the right, rarely exercised hitherto, of supreme control over its affairs. The grant of money annually voted by Parliament for the support of the Museum, amounts to 100,000l.; 10,000l. seems to be the amount of the ordinary annual grant for 1 Edinburgh Review, lviii. 220 (July, 1848 Art. Goldsmith).

FF

the department of printed books alone. The Parliamentary grant and the whole affairs of the Museum are administered by the Board of Trustees, at present fifty in number, and in which there are four constituent elements. One section of them is hereditary, and consists of what are called "Family Trustees," representing the families of personages who have made magnificent bequests of collections of various kinds to the Museum. These are the Sloane, Cotton, Harley, Townley, Elgin, and Knight families. The Family Trustees are nine in number, and among them is the present Earl of Derby. One trustee, called the Royal Trustee, is appointed by the Sovereign, in recognition of George IV.'s gift of the Royal Library to the Museum and the nation. Then there are twentyfive Trustees who are members of the Board, ex officio. These, called Official Trustees, include the chief dignitaries of the State and Church, from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the First Lord of the Treasury to the Solicitor-General, while with them are associated the Presidents of the Royal Society, the College of Physicians, the Society of Antiquaries, and the Royal Academy. We have now thirty-five out of the fifty Trustees. The remaining fifteen are called Elected Trustees, and are chosen by the thirtyfive. The elected trustees are trustees for life, and, with one important exception, share all the rights and privileges of their colleagues. This important exception is that, when a vacancy occurs in their own number, they have no voice or vote in filling it up. The choice of a new elected Trustee is made by the thirty-five without the intervention of the Trustees already elected.

In the existence of a body of Elected Trustees, we seem to have a provision for the recognition of some of the claims of men eminent in literature, archæology, and science. The honour of a seat at the Board is one which they would share, as the Edinburgh Reviever expressed it, "with dukes and earls, ambassadors and generals." Eminent men of letters, moreover, are precisely the persons best fitted to superintend the

management of a vast library of books and manuscripts, kept up and augmented chiefly for the sake of the very class to which they belong: as elected trustees they would be called on to perform, with advantage to the public, functions pleasant to themselves. Accordingly, the elective trusteeship of the British Museum has been termed "the Blue Riband of Literature," and as such it was bestowed on Hallam and on Macaulay. Let us note, however, the collective results of a system which throws the choice of the fifteen Elected Trustees exclusively into the hands of the nine Family Trustees, of the Royal Trustee, and of the thirty-five Official Trustees. You have seen that out of the forty members of the French Academy, in 1862, at least twenty-one-half of the wholewere among the most eminent men of letters in France. Here is the list of the Elected Trustees of the British Museum as it stood at the beginning of 1863-The Marquis of Lansdowne, Sir David Dundas, Sir Philip Egerton, the Duke of Somerset, Sir Roderick Murchi son, Dean Milman, Earl Russell, Mr. Gladstone, Sir G. C. Lewis, Mr. Walpole, Lord Eversley, Mr. Grote, Lord Taunton, the Duke of Northumberland, and Sir Thomas Phillips. In this list, the claims of literature and science are represented by one-fifth of the bodySir Roderick Murchison, Dean Milman, and Mr. Grote. It may be said that Sir G. C. Lewis was an author, and that Earl Russell and Mr. Gladstone are authors, of more or less note. But when it is observed that with them are associated, as Elected Trustees, officials and ex-officials-the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Taunton, Lord Eversley, Mr. Walpole-who have no such pretensions, one is led to surmise that they would have been elected Trustees had Mr. Gladstone never written on Homer, Earl Russell on the History of Europe in the eighteenth century, or the late Sir G. C. Lewis on the Credibility of Early Roman History. The hardship is that official personages like the Duke of Somerset, Earl Russell, and Mr. Gladstone, are at this moment trustees in virtue of their

respective offices, and that by sitting as Elected Trustees they simply displace men intellectually eminent, but without high political position. To such an extent has this accumulation of the same honours on the same head been carried, that from the evidence given before the Royal Commission, appointed in 1850 to inquire into the management of the Museum, the late Lord Aberdeen, it appears, was once a Trustee in a threefold capacity. He was a Trustee as Secretary of State, a Trustee as President of the Society of Antiquaries, and he was also an Elected Trustee ! It is worth noting that Her Majesty has set the electing Trustees of the Museum an example which they might lay to heart. Until recently, the solitary Royal Trustee had always been one of the highest personages in the kingdom, generally a member of the Royal Family. The royal trusteeship was held by the late Duke of Cambridge at his death in 1850. Lately, however, it has been conferred by the Crown on Dr. Cureton, who is, at least, an eminent Syriac scholar, and who, having been formerly an officer of the Museum, has a practical acquaintance with the details of the establishment which he is called upon to co-operate in governing.

The Royal Commission of 1850 saw the injustice and the evils of the present system, and recommended a sweeping change in the government of the Museum. According to the scheme of the Commission, the government of the Museum was to be entrusted to an Executive Council, consisting of a chairman and six members. The Trustees were to elect from their own body four members of the Board of Government; the Crown was to appoint the chairman, with the two remaining members of the Board-one of them to be distinguished for his literary attainments, the other for his attainments in natural history. No action has been taken upon this Report, and the constitution and government of the Museum remain in 1863 much the same as they were in 1850. The leaders of the two great political parties in the State have been adroitly

It

conciliated and gained over by being chosen Elected Trustees,' and no organic change will be proposed by them. It is to the House of Commons that we must look for a reform: and, strange to say, in the matter of the National Collections, literary, artistic, and scientific, the House of Commons has more than once of late years shown a singular independence, and refused to follow the advice of its accredited party-leaders. It has rejected by large majorities the proposal, supported by the leaders of parties on both sides of the House, to break up the Museum and scatter its collections. remains for the House of Commons to make amends for the inertia displayed by successive Governments, whether Liberal or Conservative, in carrying into effect neither the spirit nor the letter of the recommendations of the Royal Commission of 1850. The House of Commons could easily pass a resolution recommending that all vacancies among the Elected Trustees should be filled up from men eminent in literature, scholarship, archæology, and science, and that the Elected Trustees should themselves have a voice in the election of their colleagues. As the whole constitution of the Museum depends on the will of the House of Commons, which votes the funds for its support, such a resolution, though merely recommendatory, would, doubtless, have the force of a command. Parliamentary and public opinion steadily operating, we should in course of time have in the Elected Trustees of the British Museum a British Institute, comprehending the intellectual notabilities of the country, pcssessing the confidence of the nation, appealing successfully for funds to Parliaments and Governments, and worthy to be appointed the executors of the British Monthyons and Goberts. They would find the objects of the Institution which they governed capable of being expanded and varied. Presiding over the State Paper and the Record Offices, the Master of the Rolls has developed enterprises wider than the customary calen1 Mr. Disraeli has been lately elected a trustee.

daring and cataloguing, useful and indispensable as they are. We owe to him, among other benefits conferred, the publication, at an expense insignificant to the country, of the series of "Chronicles and Memorials of Great "Britain and Ireland during the Middle "Ages"; important contributions, which could or would never have been made by private publishing enterprise, to the political, ecclesiastical, social-nay, to the intellectual and scientific history of medieval England, for the series includes a careful edition of the works of Roger Bacon. Men of originality and intelligence, of experience and energy, placed at the head, or in the headship, of the Museum, with that vast library of books and manuscripts under their care, might soon find the example of the Master of the Rolls worthy of imitation, and Government as ready in their case as in his to give the needful preliminary aid. What "Materials for English History" of the post-mediæval ages lie buried in the manuscript masses of the Museum that might be made to yield new gold to skilful "prospecters" wisely directed and suitably equipped! As regards the reproduction of books, take but a single

instance. If the student wishes to consult a collection of the memoirs, illustrating the history of the great civil war of the seventeenth century, and edited with even a glimmer of modern light, he must betake himself to the twenty-six volumes of the French translation of them, which Guizot published forty years ago! Such a collection, edited by competent Englishmen, would not only be a boon to the student, but would enrich the historic literature of the country, and claim the aid of a parliamentary grant surely not less strongly than the chronicles of mediæval England. Many are the enterprises of this kind, from which the ordinary publisher naturally holds aloof, that would reward the encouragement of the State, and, if well-managedwisdom above directing intelligent industry below-would entail but slight, if any, pecuniary loss in the long run. Thus a reform in the government of the Museum might be the precursor of an important step towards the solution of the hard problem with which this article started the organization of literature itself.

"He stirs my sluggish pulse like wine, He melts me like the wind of spice, Strong as strong Ajax' red right hand,

And grand like Juno's eyes.

"I cannot melt the sons of men,

I cannot fire and tempest-toss :Besides, those days were golden days,

Whilst these are days of dross."

She laughed a feminine low laugh,

Yet did not stay her dexterous hand: "Now tell me of those days," she said,

"When time ran golden sand."

"Then men were men of might and right,

Sheer might, at least, and weighty swords;

Then men, in

blood and fire,
open
Bore witness to their words,

Crest-rearing kings with whistling

spears;

But if these shivered in the shock They wrenched up hundred-rooted trees,

Or hurled the effacing rock.

"Then hand to hand, then foot to foot, Stern to the death-grip grappling then,

66

Who ever thought of gunpowder

Amongst these men of men?

They knew whose hand struck home the death,

They knew who broke but would not bend,

Could venerate an equal foe

And scorn a laggard friend.

"Calm in the utmost stress of doom, Devout toward adverse powers above,

They hated with intenser hate

And loved with fuller love.

"Then heavenly beauty could allay
As heavenly beauty stirred the
strife:

By them a slave was worshipped more
Than is by us a wife."

She laughed again, my sister laughed,
Made answer o'er the laboured
cloth :

Her needle erred; a moment's pause, A moment's patience, all was well. Then she: "But just suppose the horse,

Suppose the rider fell?

"Then captive in an alien house,

Hungering on exile's bitter bread,— They happy, they who won the lot Of sacrifice," she said.

Speaking she faltered, while her look Showed forth her passion like a glass: With hand suspended, kindling eye,

Flushed cheek, how fair she was!

"Ah well, be those the days of dross;

This, if you will, the age of gold: Yet had those days a spark of warmth, While these are somewhat cold"Are somewhat mean and cold and slow,

Are stunted from heroic growth: We gain but little when we prove The worthlessness of both."