THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

Matamata Record, Volume XIII, Issue 1104, 10 March 1930, Page 6

THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

GHOSTS OF GREAT AUTHORS. The British Museum reading room is peopled by the ghosts of great men who have gone there and done some work which they needed to do, and taken it home to their studies and put it permanently into English literature. Algernon Charles Swinburne was a visitor, and there is a record that he swooned in the place as a result of the closeness of the atmosphere. Perhaps it was not as good in his time as it is in ours, with electric lighting and modern ventilation (writes Jas. Milne in the Woman’s Magazine). Gardiner, the historian of the English Civil War, attended the reading room for such a long time and so industriously that h*. mastered a collection of 23,003 Sracts. Butler, the author of “ Erewh„n,” makes several allusions in his books to his ivsits to the reading room of the British Museum. Charles Lamb went there, Charles Dickens went there, and the other ghosts which you would meet, if you could see them, would include Edward Fitz Gerald, who rendered Omar Khayyam into such beautiful English. Also Lockhart, the biographer of Scott, and Scott himself, Macaulay, and Thomas Carlyle, who said, in his grudging way, that the. people he saw at the reading room seemed to be of a very miscellaneous character. Isaac Disraeli sought information for his “ Curiosities of Literature,” and even John Wesley was at the British Museum in its early days, and he said about it: “ What account will a man give to the Judge of Quick and Dead for a life spent in collecting these ? ” By “ these ” he may not have meant books, because he probably never penetrated to the reading room as it was in that time. No doubt he had in mind the collections of many things which the British Museum houses, as, for instance, china, sculpture, or what you like. John Wesley was a man of activity, not a browser, and indeed, there is little room for the browser in the reading room to-day. Everybody you see there is busy writing and reading, extracting information for aome use in our tremendously go-ahead world, or they would be elsewhere.