re-appointed in the following session its numbers were considerably curtailed. Mr. Hawes, a man of no great refinement, but of thorough business capacity, and an excellent specimen of the not unfrequent type of popular M.P., who begins as a patriot and ends as a placeman, represented the reforming element, together with Dr. Bowring and some other members of a similar stamp, who mostly disappeared after the first session. Lord Stanley (the late Lord Derby) and Sir Robert Inglis represented the interests of the Trustees. Sir Philip Egerton, Mr. Ridley Colbome, and Mr. Bingham Baring were also amongst the most prominent members, Mr. Sotheron Estcourt being chairman.
The administrative organisation of the Museum at the time was certainly better calculated to invite inquiry than to sustain it. The offices of the Principal Librarian and Secretary, instead of being united, as at present—and of which more hereafter—were divided, with very mischievous consequences as regarded the authority of the former officer, and attended by all the evils of divided responsibility. Sir H. Ellis was an excellent antiquary and a most kind-hearted man, but could never, under any circumstances, have been more than the nominal head of the Museum.
The Secretary was, as has already been remarked, the Rev. Josiah Forshall, and the government of the Museum was in his hands. By a most preposterous regulation, while the inferior officer, the Secretary, always attended the meetings of the Trustees, the Principal Librarian was never present unless summoned. Mr. Forshall enjoyed the fullest confidence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in whose hands, by a tacit understanding which had become traditional, almost all administrative arrangements were left by the Principal Trustees. He was entirely opposed to all innovation tending to impart a more popular character to the Institution; and was, in fine, as thoroughly the representative of the principles on which the Museum had hitherto been administered as Panizzi was of those destined to supersede them.
Mr. Millard, the trivial cause of the Committee’s great effect, did not occupy much of its attention. It appeared that he had been removed for two causes, either of which was in itself sufficient to justify the act: he was incompetent, and his services had been dispensed with. The inferior work on which he had been engaged was discontinued; he was fit for nothing else. He had been treated with great and, indeed, with immoderate indulgence, having been allowed to remain two years after his virtual dismissal, in order “to give him an opportunity of finding another situation.” His case, it appeared, had kept the amiable Principal Librarian awake all night; the Keeper of MSS. himself, strangely enough, had given him a testimonial to the Windham Club. His patron endeavoured to prove his efficiency; but on July 2nd Sir Frederick Madden, then Assistant-Keeper of the MSS. came down “with some instances of Mr. Millard’s mistakes, and some questions which I should like to put him.” For some sufficient reason the instances were not adduced, the questions were not put, and no more was heard of Mr. Millard. He had, however, made an outlet for the long accumulating dissatisfaction with the Museum management, and the Committee found themselves arbiters in contentions affecting every Department in the Institution. They had to digest Mr. Forshall’s opinion that “men professionally engaged in literary and scientific pursuits” were unfit for the office of Trustee; and to reconcile Sir Henry Ellis’s statement that literary and scientific men looked up to a Trusteeship as the blue ribbon of their calling, with his admission that not one of them had ever obtained it. They had to enquire whether Sir Henry had made an adequate examination of the Baron de Joursanvault’s manuscripts, magnanimously offered by that nobleman to the English nation for 100,000 francs and permission to import 500 pipes of Beaune wine duty free. If he had not done so, was it because the collection was shelved so high that Sir Henry could not get at it without a ladder, and was it really a fact that no ladder could be found in the whole town of Pomard? Was it true, as asserted by the Edinburgh Review, that cases of birds had been transferred to the College of Surgeons and subsequently repurchased by the Museum? Or was Sir Henry Ellis’s conjecture admissible that certain green glass bottles, of which the transfer was acknowledged, might have been large enough and dirty enough to have been mistaken by the person who wrote that review “for packing cases?” How much of the Saurian collection bought from Mr. T. Hawkins was plaster? Was the Keeper of Geology justified in affirming that “the principal ichthyosaurus could not be exhibited without derogation from the character of the British Museum,” and that if it were treated as it deserved “the whole tail would disappear?”
Had the College of Surgeons been obliged to spend £1,000 on Zoological Literature, in consequence of the deficiencies of the British Museum Library?
It was admitted that the Museum possessed a fine collection of “Megatherium, Chalicotherium, Anthrocotherium, Anoplotherium, and Sus diluvianus” in plaster; but did it possess genuine fragments of any of these extinct quadrupeds? To be straightforward, were the “saurian and chelonian reptiles” in a confused and nameless state? Would the “intelligent visitor” have naturally expected to find “the limited space available for exhibition filled with twenty-eight cats placed together? Had the larger mammalia been mostly devoured by insects, with the exception of the llama’s mouth, which had happily withstood their ravages from consisting of plaster of Paris? The brunt of the assault, it will be seen, was borne by the Zoological Department, whose comparatively starved and neglected condition rendered it a convenient basis for attacks upon the general condition of the Museum, the assailing party being well versed in the axiom of fortification—that a fortress is no stronger than its weakest point.
The Printed Book Department, the battle-ground of subsequent years, attracted comparatively little attention at the time. The public had not yet discovered the value, either actual or potential, of such a collection. The ideal of what a National Library should be as yet only existed in Panizzi’s head. The general standard was exceedingly low, nor could this be a matter of surprise, when, as he himself pointed out, the Museum Library, after all, contained 40,000 more volumes than any library in the modern world, previous to the French Revolution.
With all the drawbacks of the Institution, its management was liberality itself, compared to that of even so splendid a library as the one at Vienna, with its accommodation for 45 readers, bringing their own pens and paper.
The acknowledged defects of the Museum Library, in some degree, served to screen its unacknowledged failings, for the Catalogue was so much behind hand that it was difficult to be certain whether any specified volume was to be found there or not. One important accession had been obtained, the English newspapers were now regularly deposited in the Library, and it was to this that the recent increase of readers was principally attributable. A late Trustee, Mr. Henry Banks, had been an incubus on the establishment, “It was extremely difficult to get any assent in his part to any purchase that was of any amount.” Mr. Baber had now more of his own way, yet when asked, “Is there that general consultation and cordial intercourse which is satisfactory to you as head of your Department?” he answered, “Certainly not.” His evidence related, in great measure, to the project for a new Catalogue, which had hitherto attracted but little attention outside the Museum. Mr. Hawes did his utmost to extort an admission that a Classed Catalogue would be desirable; but Mr. Baber, an experienced bibliographer, maintained firmly that such a Catalogue by itself was a delusion. The alphabetical arrangement was the only safe one: an index of subjects, however, might be a valuable appendage to such a Catalogue. It was the one fault of Mr. Baber’s evidence and of Panizzi’s that neither of them said how invaluable. They were probably afraid of countenancing the mischievous agitation for a Classed Catalogue pure and simple, knowing that years had already been wasted over an impracticable plan of their colleague, the Rev. T. H. Horne. Panizzi evidently felt much embarrassed between loyalty to his chief, allegiance to the Trustees, and his own strong sense of the deficiencies of the Library. His evidence, under such circumstances, was a model of tact and discretion. He implied rather than asserted, and his testimony gains greatly in cogency when read in the light of the reforms subsequently effected by himself.
In the question of classed and alphabetical Catalogues, Panizzi supported his chief, and took care to acquaint the Committee, how much the latter, and the Library, had been damaged by the compulsory withdrawal of Mr. Baber’s first plan for a Catalogue in favour of an alternative
