LIVES OF THE FOUNDERS OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM.* IN these
two volumes Mr. Edwards has recounted the complete history of the British Museum and its collections, with biographies of the chief among the collectors who gathered and the officers who ordered and arranged. The Museum history begins, if we may be allowed the bull, before there was any Museum to have one, with a relation of the various motions made towards that great end, from Archbishop Parker's earnest entreaty to Queen Elizabeth to establish a national Public Library, down to the British Museum Act under George II. We all know the vast abyss of treasures in Great Russell Street ; many of us have availed ourselves of the Library and its Reading-Room, perhaps the best ordered public institution which the nation possesses, in which the literary inquirer may peruse at will any- thing and everything, from Sinaitic MSS. or Abbey Chartularies down to chap-books of the last century, or the latest literature in every tongue which possesses any literature at all. Yet, if the
• Lives of the Founders of the British Museum, with Notices of its Chief Collectors and other Benefactors. 1570-1870. Loadon: Triibner and Co.
truth were confessed, most of us have thought no more about the founders to whom we owe all that is there, than we might have thought about the originators of the Original Chelsea Bun House.
In one sense, the Sloane collection may be called the origin of the British Museum, since Sir Hans Sloane's bequest was the immediate cause of the Act which passed in 1753; but Sir Robert Cotton's collections had been presented by his descendant to the nation many years before the Chelsea physician made his will.
Cotton's birth in 1570 is Mr. Edwards's first date. It was in Cotton's lifetime that Englishmen first began to find breathing-space and inclination to study the footprints of their own ancestors. Already, under Elizabeth, an Antiquarian Society had been formed, of which Cotton, Camden, Seldeu, Stowe, and others were members, and of which Archbishops Parke, and Whit- gift were successively chief patrons. This germ of the Society of Antiquaries was crushed by the jealousy of James I., who sus- pected the members of a disposition to discuss State topics,—a point on which, as the next few years showed, James was remarkably touchy. Sir Robert Cotton got together a most enormous mass of documents, of which a very large portion must have been once the property of the State. He is accused of having made these acquisitions improperly. And when we find (to use the words of Mr. Brewer, in his introduction to the Calendars) that "the collections made by Sir Robert Cotton for the early years of the reign of Henry VIII. . . . supply the lacunae in the official correspondence, they contain the enclosures, addresses, deciphers, and sometimes the missing por- tions of the letters now remaining in the Record Office,"—we may call upon Sir Robert's supporters to show cause against the obvious inference. Mr. Edwards attempts the defence, but is not very successful, though some of his suggestions go a good way in mitigation. And in several authenticated instances, Cotton, an honourable man in other matters, behaved very queerly about documents. Still we may remember that, as contemporary docu- ments, many of the State papers which he got hold of had not then the hundredth part of their present value, while documentary antiquities were not as yet held in any particular estimation. That Cotton was not in his own day considered as having been guilty of any moral delinquency, is pretty obvious from his own open possession, from its repeated recognition by State officials who- borrowed his documents ex gratia for collation or precedent, and above all, from the fact that it never seems to have occurred to his enemies to bring such an accusation against him when he became the subject of State prosecution. Let us remember, too, that Cotton never kept his treasures jealously to him- self. His purely antiquarian writings strike one as of the dry as dust type, yet when he applied his abilities to the present, he approved himself for sterling sense and a keen political vision. He lived much in public life, and was constantly consulted by the Crown. He worked bard under James I. at an investigation of the abuses and corruptions of the Navy, and by perseverance and acuteness effected a considerable expose, which occasioned a small measure of reform. Advising as to the "abating and reforming excesses of the Royal Household, retinue and favourites," he had the courage to say, "There is never a back-door at Court that costs not the King £2,000 yearly." He recommended the creation of baronets, and himself was one of the new creations. He searched for precedents respecting tonnage and poundage, and then wrote, "They proceed of good-will, not of duty." He was the friend of Eliot and Pym, and "acted warmly with the patriots in the first Parliament of Charles" (Forster's We of Sir J. Eliot, i. 468). His misfortunes seem to have begun at Charles L's accession. At the very coronation a silly but mortifying affront was put upon him. It had been arranged that the King should land at the water- gate of Cotton House, and Cotton had decorated the place and in- vited a large party of ladies to see the show. The Royal barge approached, Cotton and his fair bevy were a tiptoe of expectation, when, to his unspeakable chagrin, the cortege, utterly ignoring him and his waterstairs, passed on to a common landing-place, "where the landing was dirty." Nor was this all, "In regard to the coronation oath," writes Mr. Edwards, "Cotton had been consulted, and he expected to be present, carrying in his hand his own famous copy of the Gospels, known as the Evangeliary oy King Athelstan ;" but when "he presently showed himself in the Abbey, bearing the Evangeliary, he and it were contemptuously thrust aside." Mr. Edwards may think the comparison flippant, but his account of this episode of the Evangeliary reminds us irre- sistibly of the affront exhibited by Mrs. Lecount to Mrs. Wragge's "Oriental Cashmere robe," in Wilkie Collins' novel of No Name. But worse things than this were in store for poor Cotton. He con- tinued to be summoned to Council when his knowledge and ability
were needed, but before six years had gone by he was found obnoxious to the Court party, and Star-chambered. Saddest of all, his books and papers were sealed up and absolutely forbidden him. In vain he begged to be allowed his library again, his beloved books remained under the interdict. The deprivation killed him. When a messenger announced the raising of the Royal prohibition, Cotton answered :—" You come too late. My heart is broken." There is one circumstance hard to account for in his career. During a part of the reign of James I. he was an active supporter of the proposed marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta of Spain. Yet the bare notion of the Spanish match being a possibility caused a national shudder. That generation and their fathers had witnessed the inexorable bigotry, the fiendish cruelty, and the systematic faithlessness of Philip H. during the long struggle of the Netherlands for freedom and toleration ; their fear and their stubborn courage had quickened simultan- eously at the grand effort to bring England herself under the yoke of Spain and Rome ; they had seen the baffled Armada .shattered upon their shores, and their ears had rung with the names of their own Drakes, Raleighs, and Hawkinses out-fighting and out-manceuvring the Spaniard on every sea. It stirred their very souls that Elizabeth's successor should truckle to Spain and Rome, taking credit to himself even for Raleigh's execution as ordered for the gratification of the Spanish Court. We may well understand the abomination in which James's Spanish policy was held by all thinking Englishmen except those of a narrow Court circle. And yet Cotton, a man of shrewd sense and much political honesty, in the Court rather than of it, could find it in his mind to forward the Spanish match at one time. He changed his mind subsequently. Mr. Edwards notices the fact of his earlier inclina- tion, and has consulted the archives of Simancas, but is not able to give any satisfactory account of the matter.
The library formed by the unfortunate Prince Henry, the elder brother of Charles I., obliges Mr. Edwards to write a biography of that Prince. Strange to say, he utterly neglects to notice the suspicious circumstances of the Prince's death. The best esteemed Prince of Wales, perhaps, whom the nation ever possessed, was thought to have met his death by foul play, and suspicion has even been cast on his Royal father. Mr. Edwards has not a word on this subject.
George III. collected a valuable library now known as the "King's Library" in the Museum. When the old king died, his successor was disposed to make money of the books, which the Emperor of Russia was known to covet. The Ministers were shocked at the idea, but George IV. soon let them understand that the library would go to St. Petersburg unless the price came to him from elsewhere. After getting some £180,000 from the Government for it, the First Gentleman in Europe sat down to his writing-table to assure the Prime Minister of the satisfaction he felt in having "this means of advancing the literature of my country," adding, "I also feel that I am paying a just tribute to the memory of a parent whose life was adorned with every public and private virtue."
We lingered so long over Sir Robert Cotton, that we have no space left for Sloane and his predecessors the Courtens, nor for the founders of the Arundel, Elgin, Harleian, Lansdowne, and many other collections. Neither can we pause to notice the biographies of Panizzi and other generous workers to whom we owe the arranging and ordering of the whole,—or the history of the nascent institution. We do not find, by the way, that Mr. Edwards has noticed a narrow escape which the British Museum had in 1823, in its great litigation with the Bedford family, owners of the surrounding ground, the result of which was a wholesome decision cited daily as a leading case in the Court of Chancery. Of Cracherode, the bibliomaniac parson of an old Essex stock, who never in his lifetime visited one of the wonders of the kingdom in the shape of a vast tree on the estate left him by his father in Hertfordshire, who passed his life in one unvarying occupation of collecting gems, prints, and tall copies with un- mutilated margins, and who for forty years scarcely visited any spot except the shops of two booksellers (daily) and (once a week) his watchmaker, Mr. Edwards remarks that he led "a life of idyllic peacefulness," and calls on us to honour him as a noble and enlight- ened patriot. Mr. Edwards has spent many years among the treasures which these men amassed, and is grateful. We find no fault with him for being so, the mood rather argues a generous disposition. But the demands he makes upon the reader are excessive. We do not feel bound to ascribe patriotism to every collector whose collection has become public property, merely because in the sequel we derive a great benefit from his labours. A kindred feeling has led Mr. Edwards to push his yin-
dication of Cotton's possession of State documents beyond the bounds of probability. Yet we must do him the justice to say that he is scrupulously candid in suppressing nothing which makes against his own view. To this conscientiousness, perhaps, is trace- able a certain inconclusiveness when he has a doubtful question of evidence to deal with. But writers are so prone to rush at historical conclusions that we incline to regard this as an item on the credit side of Mr. Edwards' account. The two volumes contain a great deal of very interesting iuformaton.
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