A NOBLE GIFT.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIX, Issue 6696, 3 October 1882, Page 3

A NOBLE GIFT.

The time is coming on us when we hear of the vast sums spent on a single ball, and how the flowers alone ran into four figures, and how the presents in the cotillon emptied a jeweller’s shop and I should like to record how a noble-minded Americanlady spent her money on her own country. Mrs Bloomfield Moore, who is now in London, has just presented to the Pennsylvanian Museum a marvellous collection of objects of art, industry, and verlu, pictures, tapestry, ceramics of all countries and eras, carvings, jewellery, lace, ancient glass, old missals ; in fact, specimens of everything that can. delight the heart of craftsman or artist, from “Ming Dynasty ” porcelain to Mr Robert B. Browning’s last pictures. The collection has been a labor of love for many years, and its value in America, artistically, is inestimable. “You have made a South Kensington in Philadelphia,” said an English critic when he saw it at the opening a few weeks ago ; and now the artists and workers are crowding to see the new and strange beauties which a high-spirited and. generous woman has presented to them and their children for eyer. .This, is no “loan” collection of a snuff box, a book of dried seaweed, and a craclced splidat, such as go the rounds of our provincial .museums, but a right royal gift to a..nation. What John Ruskin is doing for Sheffield,Mrs Moore has done for Philadelphia.—“ Atlas” in tho “World,”