Part 1 / Book 1 — CHAPTER VI. THE FOUNDERS OF THE SLOANE MUSEUM. (continued 2)

A subsequent codicil of 1751, added nine other Trustees, five of whom were distinguished foreigners. Among the four English names are those of John Hampden (‘twenty-fourth hereditary lord of Great Hampden,’ and last lineal male descendant of that famous stock) and William Sotheby.

The Closing Years.

The declining years of a man to whom had been given, not only unusual length of days, but an unusual span both of bodily and of mental vigour, so that he remained in the rank of busy men until he had passed his eightieth year, were necessarily days of seclusion. He had enjoyed not only the honours^[52] and the comforts, but the troop of friends which should accompany old age. Yet a man who reaches the age of ninety-two must needs lose the friends of his maturity, as well as the friends of his youth. Sir Hans Sloane, in the old Manor House of Chelsea, had something of the experience which made a famous statesman of our own day, who was loth to leave the stir of London life, say—with a sigh—‘I see all the world passing my windows, but few come in.’

His chief recreations, in those latest years, lay in the continued examination of the stores of nature and of art which never palled upon his capacity of enjoyment, and in the regular weekly visit of a much younger man, who was 301very conversant in the busy world without; who could talk, and talk well, alike upon public events, upon the novelties of science, and upon the gossip of the coffee-houses and the clubs. This friend of old age was George Edwards, a naturalist of considerable acquirements, and the author of some Essays on Natural History which are still worth reading.

Sloane’s mental vigour long outlived his power of bodily locomotion. For years he could move from room to room, or on very bright days from room to garden, only by the aid of an invalid chair. In other respects, his health gave a weighty sanction to the counsel which he had been wont to give, not infrequently, in lieu of an invited but superfluous prescription. ‘I advise you’ he would say, ‘to what I practice myself. I never take physic when I am well. When I am ill, I take little, and only such as has been very well tried.’

The end of a bright, abundant, and most useful life, came at the beginning of the year 1753. On the tenth of January, George Edwards found him rapidly sinking, and suffering greatly. On the eleventh he found him at the point of death. ‘I continued with him,’ he wrote, ‘later than any one of his relatives. But I was obliged to retire—his last agonies being beyond what I could bear; although, under his pain and weakness of body, he seemed to retain a great firmness of mind and resignation to the will of God.’ He was buried at Chelsea, in the same vault in which, twenty-eight years before, he had buried his wife.

Synoptical Tables of the Sloane Museum.

This indefatigable collector had continued to enrich his Museum with new accessions as long as he lived. We have the means of estimating its growth—as regards mere numbers, of course—by comparing a synoptical table drawn up 302in 1725—for the purpose of showing to certain grumblers what had been the nature and aim of those avocations which had delayed the completion of the Natural History of Jamaica—with another table drawn up by his Trustees immediately after his death.

The comparison of numbers shows that the twenty thousand two hundred and twenty-eight coins and medals of 1725 had grown, in 1752, to thirty-two thousand. Other antiquities had increased from eight hundred and twenty-four to two thousand six hundred and thirty-five. The minerals and fossils had increased from about three thousand to five thousand eight hundred and twenty-two specimens. The botanical collection which, in 1725, had numbered eight thousand two hundred and twenty-six specimens, together with a Hortus Siccus of two hundred volumes, had become in 1752 twelve thousand five hundred specimens, with a Hortus Siccus of three hundred and thirty-four volumes. The other natural history collections had increased on the average by more than one half. The details are as follows:—

303

Volumes in 1725. Volumes in 1753.

2,686 1. Manuscripts 3,516

136 2. Drawings 347

3. Printed Books about 40,000

200 4. Hortus Siccus 334

Specimens in 1725. Specimens in 1753.

20,228 5. Medals and Coins 32,000

302 6. Antiquities 1,125

81* 7. Seals, &c. 268

441* 8. Cameos and Intaglios about 700

1,394 9. Precious Stones 2,256

[*See under No. 8.] 10. Vessels of Agate, Jasper, &c. 542

1,025 11. Crystals, Spars, &c. 1,864

730 12. Fossils, &c. 1,275

1,394 13. Metals and Mineral Ores 2,725

536 14. Earths, Sands, Salts, &c. 1,035

249 15. Bitumens, Sulphurs, &c. 399

169 16. Talcs, Micæ, &c. 388

3,753 17. Shells 5,843

804 18. Corals, Sponges, &c. 1,421

486 19. Echini, Echinites, &c. 659

183 20. Asteriæ, Trochi, &c. 241

263 21. Crustacea 363

22. Stellæ Marinæ 173

1,007 23. Fishes, and their parts 1,555

753 24. Birds, and their parts 1,172

345 25. Vipers, &c. 521

1,194 26. Quadrupeds 1,886

3,824 27. Insects 5,439

507 28. Anatomical Preparations, &c. 756

8,226 29. Vegetables 12,506

1,169 30. Miscellaneous things 2,098

319 31. Pictures and Drawings, framed 310

54 32. Mathematical Instruments 55

On the 27th January—sixteen days after Sir Hans’ death—about forty of the Trustees named in the Will met at 304Chelsea, to confer with the Executors. Lord Cadogan produced the Will and its Codicils. By these, should the bequest and its additions be accepted, the manor house and land, together with the collection in its existing state and arrangement, would be given to the Public. This, said Lord Cadogan, will save the hazard and expense of removal. Mr. William Sloane then informed the Trustees that the Executors had thought it prudent temporarily to remove the medals of gold and silver, the precious stones, gems, and vases, to the Bank of England, in order to ensure their present safety.

The Earl of Macclesfield was then placed in the chair. A synopsis of the contents of the Museum was read by Mr. James Empson, who had acted as its curator for many years. Mr. Empson was appointed to act as Secretary to the Trustees, and a form of Memorial to be addressed to the King, in order to the carrying out of the trusts of the Will, was agreed upon.

The Memorial had—eventually—the desired effect. |The Act for Establishing the British Museum.| It led, in the course of the year 1753, to the passing of an Act of Parliament—26 George II, chapter 22—which is entitled An Act for the purchase of the Museum or Collection of Sir Hans Sloane, and of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, and for providing one General Repository for the better reception and more convenient use of the said Collections, and of the Cottonian Library, and of the additions thereto.

The Act recites the tenour of the testamentary dispositions made by Sir Hans Sloane. It also recites that a provisional assent had been given by his Trustees to the removal of his Museum from the Manor House of Chelsea ‘to any proper place within the Cities of London and Westminster, or the suburbs thereof, if such removal shall be judged most advantageous to the Public.’

305The Act then proceeds to declare that, ‘Whereas, all arts and sciences have a connexion with each other, and discoveries in natural philosophy and other branches of speculative knowledge,’ for the advancement whereof the Museum was intended, may, in many instances, give help to useful experiments and inventions, ‘therefore, to the end that the said Museum may be preserved and maintained, not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of the Public,’ it is enacted by Parliament that the sum of twenty thousand pounds shall be paid to the Executors of Sir Hans Sloane, in full satisfaction for his said Museum.

In this Statute, also, the preceding original Act for the public establishment of the Cottonian Library (12th and 13th of William III, c. 7), together with the subsequent Act on that subject (5th Anne, c. 30), are severally recited, and it is declared as follows:—

Further Provisions of the Act of Incorporation.

First, ‘Although the public faith hath been thus engaged to provide for the better reception and more convenient use of the Cottonian Library, a proper repository for that purpose hath not yet been prepared, for the want of which the said Library did ... suffer by a fire;’

And secondly, ‘Arthur Edwards, late of Saint George’s, Hanover Square, in the county of Middlesex, Esquire, being desirous to preserve for the public use the said Cottonian Library, and to prevent the like accident for the future, bequeathed the sum of seven thousand pounds’—after the occurrence of a certain contingent event—for the purpose either of erecting, ‘in a proper situation, such a house as might be most likely to preserve that Library from all accidents, or—in the event of the performance by the Public, before the falling out of the contingency above mentioned, of that duty to which it already stood pledged by Act of 306Parliament, then—for the purpose of purchasing such manuscripts, books of antiquities, ancient coins, medals, and other curiosities, as might be worthy to increase the Cottonian Library aforesaid;’ to which end the same public benefactor further bequeathed his own library.

In order therefore to give due effect, at length, both to the primary donation of Sir John Cotton, and to the additional benefaction made thereto by Major Arthur Edwards, Parliament now enacted that a general repository should be provided for the several collections of Cotton, Edwards, and Sloane, and that Major Edwards’ legacy of money should be paid to the Trustees created by the new Act, in accordance with the provisions heretofore recited in Sir Hans Sloane’s codicil of 1749.

The Services of Mr. Speaker Onslow in the formation of the British Museum.

It is to the exertions, at this time, of Arthur Onslow, the then Speaker of the House of Commons, that historical students owe their debt of gratitude for the preservation of the Harleian Manuscripts from that dispersion,—abroad as well as at home,—which befel the Harleian printed books.

When the Memorial of Sloane’s Trustees was first presented to George the Second, he received it with the stolid indifference to all matters bearing upon science and mental culture, which was as saliently characteristic of that king as were his grosser vices. ‘I don’t think there are twenty thousand pounds in the Treasury,’ was the remark with which he dismissed the proposal. Money could be found, indeed, for very foolish purposes, and for very base ones. And the bareness of the Treasury was, very often, the natural result of the profligacy of the Court. But, in 1753, it was a fact.

Save for Speaker Onslow’s exertions, the Memorial would have fared little better in Parliament than at Court. The 307then Premier, Henry Pelham, was not unfriendly to the scheme, nor was he, like his royal master, a man of sordid nature; but a Minister who was every now and then obliged to write to his ambassadors abroad, even in the crisis of important negotiations, ‘I have ordered you a part of your last year’s appointments, but we are so poor that I can do no more,’ could hardly be eager to provide forty or fifty thousand pounds for the purchase of a new Museum and the safety of an old Library.

1753. Commons’ Journals, March 19, seqq.

Onslow proposed—eventually—as a means of overcoming these difficulties, that a sum of money should be raised by a public lottery, and that it should be large enough to effect not only the immediate objects contemplated by the Will of Sir Hans Sloane, and by the prior public establishment of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library, but to purchase for a like purpose the noble series of Manuscripts which had passed (just eleven years before Sloane’s death) to the executors of the last Earl of Oxford, in trust for his widow, the Dowager Countess, and for his daughter, the Duchess of Portland.

Edward, Earl of Oxford, had stood at one period of his life, in the rank of the wealthiest of Englishmen. He was the owner of estates worth some four or five hundred thousand pounds. He was, too, a man of highly intellectual and studious tastes; but, in his case, a magnificent style of living, great generosity, and excessive trust in dependants, did what is more usually the work of huge folly or of gross sins; they brought him into circumstances which, for his position in life, might almost be called those of poverty. But for this comparative impoverishment, his own act—it is more than probable—would have secured to posterity the enjoyment, in its entirety, of the splendid library he had inherited and increased.

308To the proposal of a lottery there was much solid objection. What were then called ‘parliamentary lotteries’ had been introduced expressly to put down those private lotteries, common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had been fraught with mischief. It was hoped, or pretended, that a ‘regulated’ evil would be reduced within tolerable limits, whilst bringing grist to the national mill. But the forty years that had passed since the first parliamentary lottery of 1709 had shown that the system was essentially and incurably mischievous. Pelham was averse to its continuance. As First Lord of the Treasury, it was his poverty, not his will, that consented to the adoption of so questionable an expedient for the purchase of the Sloane Collections. He had not, individually, any such love of learning as might have induced an appeal to Parliament to set, for once, an example of liberal and far-sighted legislation. He merely stipulated that some stringent provisos should be put into the Act, directed against the nefarious practices of the lottery-jobbers.

The Lottery of 1753 for the Purchase of the Sloane and Harleian Collections.

Eventually, it was enacted that there should be a hundred thousand shares, at three pounds a share; that two hundred thousand pounds should be allotted as prizes, and that the remaining hundred thousand—less the expenses of the lottery itself—should be applied to the threefold purposes of the Act, namely, the purchase of the Sloane and Harleian Collections; the providing of a Repository; and the creation of an annual income for future maintenance.

By the precautionary clauses of the Bill, provision was made for the prolonged sale of shares; for the prevention of the purchase by any one adventurer of more than twenty shares, or ‘tickets,’ and for other impediments, as it was 309thought, to a fraudulent traffic in the combined covetousness and ignorance of the unwary.

All these precautions proved to be vain. Mr. Pelham’s opposition was abundantly justified by the result. Fraud proved to be, in that age, just as inseparable an element in a Lottery scheme, however good its purpose, as fraud has proved to be, in this age, an inseparable element (at one stage or other of the business) in a Railway scheme,—however useful the line proposed to be made.

It thus came to pass that the foundation of the British Museum gave rise to a great public scandal. When evidence was produced that many families had been brought to misery, as the first incident in the annals of a beneficent and noble foundation, a somewhat dull Session of Parliament was suddenly enlivened by an animated and angry debate.

The Prosecution of Leheup for his dealings with the Museum Lottery.

The provident clauses in the Lottery Act of 1753 were made of no effect, mainly by entrusting the chief share in working the Act to an accomplished jobber. One Peter Leheup was made a Commissioner of the Lottery. This man had held some employment or other at Hanover, from which he had been recalled with circumstances of disgrace. |1753. December.| It is to be inferred, from the way in which his name points an epigrammatic phrase in one of the letters of Bolingbroke,^[53] and in more than one of those of Horace Walpole, that it had come, long before this appointment took place, to have a sort of proverbial currency, like the names of ‘Curll’ or of ‘Chartres.’ But, be that as it may, Mr. Commissioner Leheup set on foot as thriving and as flagitious a traffic in Sloane lottery tickets, as was ever 310set on foot in railway shares by a clever promoter of our own day. He wrote circular letters instructing his correspondents how most effectually to evade the Act. He sold nearly three hundred tickets to a single dealer by furnishing him with a list of ‘Roes’ and ‘Does,’ ‘Gileses’ and ‘Stileses’ at discretion. He supplied himself, with equal liberality; and contrived to close the subscription, after an actual publicity of exactly six hours—for the issue of one hundred thousand tickets. In a few days, of course, tickets in abundance were to be had, at sixteen shillings premium upon each, and in what looked to be a still rising market. The trap proved to be brilliantly ‘successful.’

The subsequent explosion of parliamentary anger was rather increased than lessened by an attempt of Henry Fox (afterwards the first Lord Holland) to extenuate Leheup’s offence by some arguments of the ‘Tu quoque’ sort. By a great majority, the House of Commons sent up an address praying the King to direct his Attorney General to prosecute the chief offender, who was accordingly convicted and fined a thousand pounds. It is not uninstructive to note that Horace Walpole—himself one of the Sloane Trustees—treats the matter in one of his letters exactly in the offhand man-of-the-world style in which Henry Fox had treated it in the House of Commons.^[54]

By this unfortunate episode, the name of one of the best of Englishmen was brought into a sort of momentary connection with the name of one of the worst. But the chief discredit of the story does not really rest upon Leheup. A private citizen, of moderate means, had been willing to expend seventy or eighty thousand pounds—besides an inestimable 311amount of labour and research—upon an object essentially and largely public. Yet a British Parliament could not summon up enough of public spirit to tax its own members, in common with their tax-paying fellow subjects throughout the realm, to the extent of a hundred thousand pounds, in order to meet an obvious public want, to redeem an actual parliamentary pledge, and to secure a conspicuous national honour for all time to come. That want of public spirit did not exhaust its results with the ruin of the poor families, scattered here and there, whose scanty means had been hazarded and lost by gambling, under a parliamentary temptation. It impressed itself, so to speak, on the subsequent history of the institution for more than forty years. The Museum had been founded grudgingly. It was kept up parsimoniously.

Had that fact been otherwise, the story of the knavery of Peter Leheup would have little merited recital a century after it, and he, had passed into oblivion.

The value of so small an incident in the crowded story of our National Museum lies simply in the fact that it forms a just and salient illustration of the narrowness of spirit with which the then representatives of the people received the liberal gift of public benefactors. It serves to show why it was that, from the year 1753 down to some years after 1800, the History of the British Museum casts very little honour on Britain as a nation, whereas the precedent history of its integral parts, as separate and infant collections, casts, and will long continue to cast, great honour on the memory of the Cottons, the Harleys, and the Sloanes, by whom they were painfully gathered and most liberally dispensed.

Happily, as the course of this narrative—whatever its 312shortcomings—cannot fail to show, the literary and scientific treasures which men of that stamp had collected, came, in a subsequent generation (and, in a chief measure, by dint of the exertions of the Trustees and Officers to whom they had been, in course of time, confided) to be more adequately estimated by Ministers and by Parliament in their public capacity, as well as by the more cultivated portion of the people generally. For more than a half-century past the History of the British Museum has been one that any Briton may take delight and pride in telling. And such it promises to be, preeminently, in the time yet to come. In a conspicuous sense, the men by whom it was first founded, and the men by whom, for what is now a long time past, it has been administered and governed, have alike been true workers for Posterity.

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BOOK THE SECOND. THE ORGANIZERS, AND EARLY AUGMENTORS.

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