time he found it necessary to increase his own authority and, incidentally, that of his successors, and to secure at his disposal everywhere powerful means of enforcing his will. If PorThe Quarterly Review.

firio Diaz has been for long a dictator, he has perhaps proved himself one of the mildest and least selfish autocrats whom the world has ever known. Percy F. Martin.

The imposing ceremony wherewith in June last their Majesties opened the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the magnificence of the buildings which now form the home of our national art collections, could hardly fail to inspire in the minds of those who were present reflections on the changes which have taken place in museums generally during the past generation.

Time was, and not so many years ago, when any museum was merely a receptacle for any and every article which might be considered a curiosity. Who does not remember the singular medley of exhibits which made up the collection in the museum of a county town that boasted such an establishment? An ill-stuffed crocodile, depending from the ceiling; a handful of flint arrow heads, found in the neighborhood, shared a glass-covered case with bead ornaments from Central Africa, a box of undescribed shells, some bone trifles carved by French prisoners in England during the Napoleonic wars, and other strangely assorted miscellany. On the shelves an array of stuffed birds unrecognizable under the dust and decay of years; gods from the Fiji Islands, ancient cannon balls. weapons from various regions of the earth, made picturesque variety against the walls. Method and ar rangement were totally lacking; unless the museum possessed a collection of coins, in which case, it is fair to say. an attempt was made to display them in order. Some of the exhibits were Jabelled; but not a few bore nothing to

enlighten the visitor as to their identity, origin, or use.

Such displays as these might stimulate curiosity, but their educative value was literally nil. The impression a county-town museum left upon the mind of the visitor who had strayed into the place to while away an hour of waiting for his train, or to escape the passing shower, was much the same as that left by the storehouse of a dealer in curios. The place was generally empty save for occasional invasion by small and idle boys; amusement of a somewhat dismal kindmight be afforded by the miscellany. That it could, or should, provide instruction was an idea that was wholly wanting.

The same absence of idea that a museum might be, or ought to be, instructive was not peculiar to the museum of a provincial town. It obtained in London equally: some of the officials connected with the British Museum in pre-Victorian days possessed more advanced views on this point; but the public, generally, regarded it merely as a storehouse where curiosities were kept for the amusement of those who had spare time to go back and look at them. It was a resort for the idle to gaze and wonder. In the popular esteem it had no other aim or purpose.

It is interesting to turn for a moment to the voluminous mass of evidence taken by the Select Committee appointed to inquire into the management and affairs of the British Mu

seum in 1835. The views held by most museum officials of those days were as yet undeveloped. Mr. J. G. Children, the curator in charge of the Natural History Department, was asked (Qs. 3364-6):

Q. "While you were employed in arranging the collection in scientific order, did you keep distinctly in view at the same time the making of it at tractive to the general public?"

Ans. "Not further than distinctly exhibiting the specimens; there has been no particularly ornamental way of exhibiting them; that has not been considered, nor do I well know how it could be done."

Q. "Do you think it would be consistent with science to arrange the specimens in such a way as to give a slight notion of the habits of a family?"

Ans. "Does the Committee mean by putting them in natural positions? It might be done, though it is not in general done. The effect would depend on the skill of the artist."

In this department, of course, the museum official was dependent upou the skill of the taxidermist: he was not free to give effect to any plans of his own if his ideas had progressed beyond "distinctly exhibiting the specimens." It is not necessary to labor the point: one need only walk through the splendid bird-galleries of the Natural History Museum to see how far we have progressed, and to discover how interesting and instructive the museum curator of our own time, aided by modern taxidermy, makes a case of stuffed birds. The "specimen" of an earlier day told the visitor nothing: that of our own, mounted in a natural pose with its nest and eggs amid artistically preserved natural surroundings, tells him more than he can learn from descriptions in books; more than he can learn in any way short of observing for himself birds in their woodland, meadow, or sea-cliff haunts.

"Tra

The truth is that until the 'sixties, and perhaps later, we had not progressed beyond the seventeenth-century conception of a museum. descant's Ark," the earliest museum of which record remains, could not have been very dissimilar from the English provincial museum of forty years ago. John Tradescant, the reader may be reminded, was a gardener of eminence, who is believed to have died in the year 1637: he had a passion for collecting curiosities of all descriptions, and these he exhibited in his house in South Lambeth. A son, also named John, inherited his father's taste, in, apparently, an intensified form: he enlarged the collection and travelled widely in his search for additions to it.

A few quotations from the catalogue of this "Collection of Rarities presently at South Lambeth near London," which was published by John Tradescant junior in 1657, will show its character: "Some kindes of Birds, their Egges, Beaks, Clawes, Feathers and Spurres," "Divers sorts of Egges from Turkie one given for a Dragon's Egge," "Easter Egges of the Patriarch of Jerusalem," "Two feathers of the Phoenix Tayle," "Cherrystone, on one side S. George and Dragon perfectly cut and on the other 88 Emperours' Faces."

This collection eventually came into the possession of Elias Ashmole: he presented it, together with curiosities of his own, in 1683, to Oxford University, which erected the old Ashmolean buildings to accommodate the gift. A museum which contained, among other curiosities, feathers from the tail of the Phoenix and the egg of a dragon, no doubt embraced a great deal else that was false and spurious; but for at least one item posterity owes gratitude to this seventeenth-century museum maker. Tradescant's collection included a stuffed bird of which relics

remain to this day-namely, "a Dodar from the Island of Mauritius"; the head and foot of this dodo, the only remains of the famous bird known, if I am not mistaken, are now treasured in the University Museum of Oxford. Even as Elias Ashmole's gift formed the nucleus of the museum known by his name at Oxford, so did the collections of Sir Hans Sloane contribute to form that of the British Museum. Public collections were unknown in the seventeenth century, but the few large collections made by private individuals were accessible to those who might wish to see them. Sir Hans Sloane's was the most remarkable of the time; and from the somewhat cursory account of it which appears in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1748, we are justified in assuming that Sir Hans Sloane recognized the educative possibilities of a museum, and endeavored to make his collection instructive.

When the then Prince and Princess of Wales paid Sir Hans a visit at Chelsea, his collection consisted of over 200,000 objects of various kinds. Natural history specimens collected during fifteeen months' residence in Jamaica, where he had held the appointment of physician to the Governor (the Duke of Albermarle) in 1687-8, appear to have formed the beginning; and for about sixty-five years he had continually added to his treasures. There were "tables spread out with drawers fitted with all sorts of pre cious stones in their native beds" for example; collections of coins. medals, fossils (or "remains of the antediluvian world," to quote the contemporary account); Greek, Roman, British, and Egyptian antiquities; dried plants and insects, shells, feathers, and other specimens. The Gentleman's Magazine refers to the "immense treasures of the valuable and instructive productions of nature and art." The italics are mine: the words clearly indicate that this

was a collection put together not to appeal only to idle curiosity.

When Sir Hans' museum and his large library became, under the owner's will, the property of the nation, they were deemed sufficiently valuable to be worthy of a proper home: and the collections were placed in Montagu House, which was purchased for the purpose; these, with the Cottonian and Harleian Manuscripts, formed the basis upon which the national collections have been reared.

The educative purpose of Sir Hans Sloane's collections no doubt developed as his museum grew, but we cannot doubt that the original idea was to collect for the sake of collecting. It is impossible for one man to be an expert in every department of science, art, and industry; and to possess any valuable educative quality a collection must be made by one who has closely studied the subject to which it refers, and knows the worth and interest of each item.

Medical men and naturalists were the first to make collections with the definite purpose of gaining and imparting instruction. The famous surgeon John Hunter, for about thirty years, 1763-1793, preserved anything he considered likely to prove useful for subsequent reference to members of his own profession, and his collections became the nucleus of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. The origin of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art is traced to the famous physicians Sir Andrew Balfour (1630-1694) and Robert Sibbald (16411722); both were enthusiastic collectors, the former of natural curiosities generally, the latter devoting himself more particularly to zoological specimens, as might be expected of so keen a naturalist.

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) made his collection of paintings, drawings and sculpture, we may fairly assume, in

the spirit of a connoisseur, without educative purpose; he deserves passing mention as one of the public-spirIted men who presented the fruits of his taste and industry to the nation during his life-time. The furniture in the house in Lincoln's Inn Fields is now considered the part of the gift best worth seeing, though there are some excellent pictures, notably Hogarth's Rake's Progress.

The attitude of the public towards museums generally during our Own time was reflected in the speeches made in Parliament when the idea of opening these institutions on Sunday was first mooted.

No small measure of progress in management and classification of collections had been made before the year 1879, when Lord Thurlow's motion to permit access to museums and picture galleries on Sunday afternoons was vetoed in the House of Lords; but those who successfully opposed the innovation had not, it would seem, realized that museum or picture gallery could be otherwise than a place of recreation; of intellectual recreation it is true, but still a place of amusement, and therefore a resort which it would be improper to throw open on Sundays. "Open your museums," they said in effect, "and clamor for the opening of theatres and music halls must inevitably follow"; as though the museum and the music hall existed for identical purposes and what was applicable to the one was applicable to the other.

Some stress was laid by peers who spoke upon the fact that Sunday work would be thrown upon attendants and officials, and this perhaps was the only sound argument advanced; the opponents of the step based their main objection on the plea that it would destroy the character of the British Sunday by affording opportunities of recreation which would pave the way to

the "Continental Sunday" with its work as well as its pleasure. A few speakers referred to museums in broader terms; Viscount Midleton incidentally spoke of them as "places of public instruction and amusement": and when the subject was debated in the House of Commons in 1896, Mr. Thomas Lough, the member for West Islington, spoke of the "useless lessons" to be learned in a museum.

Now I am not prepared to say that they were wrong who insisted upon the "innocent recreation" a visit to the museum on Sunday implies. Assuredly far more people visit museums, whether on Sunday or any of the other six days of the week, in search of pleasure, than visit them for instruction: I have merely glanced at this phase of the subject by way of showing how little the educative possibilities of the museum were realized within the memory of persons not yet middle-aged.

One of our national inconsistencies, and not the least glaring, was swept away when the British Museum and others were made accessible to the public on Sunday afternoons. It was

a wise measure, one that had been far too long delayed, but was fully appreciated when it came. It materially widened the scope of usefulness of these institutions; they had been opened three evenings per week till ten o'clock at night as a method of enabling the working classes to visit them; but the average worker did not take sufficient interest in what he might see in a museum to make an expedition thereto after a long day's work.

Who shall venture to assert that the visitor of ordinary intelligence, whether he be workman or schoolboy, who strolls through any one of the great galleries in the Victoria and Albert Museum, whether among pictures, sculpture, wood carving, armor, porce. lain, textiles, or what you will, does.

not carry away therefrom some new impression? Who can say of the large majority that what they see does not kindle the spark of a new interest and turn their thoughts in a new direction? Much more do the children, more impressionable than the parents they accompany, gain new ideas from this glimpse of strange worlds; the ideas may be vague and nebulous, but the seed has been sown and a crop may follow.

Dr. John Edward Grey, one of the pioneers of what I may call the modern museum movement, said in the address he delivered before the British Association (Section D) at Bath in 1864, that the purposes for which a museum was establishel were two: first the diffusion of instruction and rational amusement among the mass of the people, and secondly to afford the scientific student every possible means of examining and studying the specimens of which the collections consist.

We may take it that if a collection of any kind is to convey instruction, it must be properly classified and displayed; its arrangement must be such as to enable the uninformed visitor to trace the progress which has been made in the course of centuries. An admirable example of chronological arrangement occurs to mind in the series of rooms in the Victoria and Albert Museum wherein are exhibited the earthenware and porcelain of various ages and countries, from the pottery of Ancient Egypt to the Worcester and Chelsea products of our own age.

Not every collection lends itself to chronological arrangement with perfect facility; but the instructional value of any, whether of art, arms, or domestic appliances, depends SO largely upon arrangement that those who realize the true purpose of a museum lay the greatest stress upon it.

The custodians of our national col

lections are unfortunately handicapped in this part of their work. The donations and bequests which are received from private individuals form no small part of the public possessions, and these are frequently given or bequeathed with the stipulation that the collection shall be kept together as a complete unit.

Such stipulation, natural as it is. must, as I venture to think, do something to retard the progress of the modern museum ideal; which, as the late Sir W. H. Flower said in his presidential address to the Museums Association in 1893, is "not only the simple preservation of the objects contained in it, but also their arrangement in such a manner as to provide for the instruction of those who visit it." Our national collections profit enormously from private munificence in the shape of gift, bequest and loan, but it is to be regretted that gifts and bequests should so often be accompanied by a stipulation which prevents the greatest educational use being obtained from them.

A striking instance of the control exercised by testators over their bequests may be cited. A certain valuable collection of paintings was bequeathed to the nation with the proviso that the pictures should not be exhibited on Sunday. The works comprised in the collection might be, and are, distributed in appropriate rooms; and the Sunday afternoon visitor is confronted by green baize coverings with which the canvases on that day are shrouded in order to comply with the terms of the bequest.

So far I have referred only to the incidental educational uses of a museum; to the effect the exhibits may produce, it may be almost insensibly, upon the visitor who resorts thither without idea of gaining advantage in the shape of mental improvement. There is another class for whom the