Chapter I

GENERAL VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, UNDER THE
ADMINISTRATION, AS PRINCIPAL-LIBRARIAN, OF JOSEPH PLANTA.

... Perséverance keeps honour bright.
To have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery.
_Troilus and Cressida._

‘Signor, mirate, come ’l tempo vola,
E siccome la vita
Fugge, e la Morte nè sovra le spalle,
Voi siete or qui: pensate alla partita
Che l’ alma ignuda e sola
Conven ch’ arrive a quel dubbioso calle.’.
PETRARCH (_Italia mia_, &c.).

_Notices of the Life of Joseph_ PLANTA, _third
Principal-Librarian.—Improvements in the Internal Economy of the
Museum introduced or recommended by Mr._ PLANTA.—_His labours for
the enlargement of the Collections—and on the Museum Publications
and Catalogues.—The Museum Gardens and the Duke of_ BEDFORD.

Hitherto these pages have chiefly had to do with the history of the integral parts of the British Museum, and with that of the men by whom these integral parts, taken severally, were first founded or first gathered. We have now to glance at the organic history of the whole, after the primary Collections and the early additions to them came, by aggregation, to be combined into the existing national establishment. It may, at best, be only by glances that so wide a subject can (within the limits of this one volume) be looked over, in retrospect. That necessity of being brief suggests a connection of the successive epochs in the story of the Museum, for seventy years, with the lives of the three eminent men who have successively presided over the institution since the beginning of the present century. Those three official lives, I think, will be found to afford succinct divisions or breakings of the subject, as well as to possess a distinctive personal interest of their own. Our introductory chapters will therefore—in relation to the chapters which follow them—be, in part, retrospective, and, in part, prospective.

When Dr. Charles MORTON died (10 February, 1799), Joseph PLANTA was, by the three principal Trustees, appointed to be his successor. The choice soon commended itself to the Public by the introduction of some important improvements into the internal economy of the institution. It is the first librarianship which is distinctively marked as a reforming one. In more than one of his personal qualities Mr. PLANTA was well fitted for such a post as that of Principal Officer of the British Museum. He had been for many years in the service of the Trustees. He had won the respect of Englishmen by his literary attainments. He was qualified, both by his knowledge of foreign languages and by his eminent courtesy of manners, for that salient part of the duties of librarianship which consists in the adequate reception and the genial treatment of strangers.

Joseph PLANTA was of Swiss parentage. He was of a race and family which had given to Switzerland several worthies who have left a mark in its national history. He was born, on the twenty-first of February, 1744, at Castasegna, where his father was the pastor of a reformed church. The boy left Switzerland before he had completed the second year of his age. [Sidenote: LIFE OF JOSEPH PLANTA, THIRD PRINCIPAL-LIBRARIAN.] He began his education at Utrecht, and continued it, first at the University of Göttingen, and afterwards by foreign travel—whilst yet open to the formative influences of youthful experience upon character—both in France and in Italy. It was thus his fortune to combine what there is of good in the characteristics of the cosmopolite with what is better in those of a patriotic son of the soil. It was Joseph PLANTA’S fortune never to live in Switzerland, as a resident, after the days of early infancy, but, for all that, he remained a true Swiss. And one of the acts of his closing years in England was to make a most creditable contribution to Helvetic history.

Andrew PLANTA, father of Joseph, came to London in 1752. He was a man of good parts and of pleasing address. He established himself as pastor of a German congregation, and was also made an Assistant-Librarian in the British Museum. Afterwards, he was chosen to be a Fellow of the Royal Society and a ‘reader’ to Queen CHARLOTTE. That appointment brought with it, in course of time, a measure of Court influence by which young PLANTA profited. His youthful ‘_Wanderjahre_’ had inspired the growing man with a keen desire to see more of foreign countries. When the father’s favour at Court put him in a position to represent at head-quarters the youth’s fancy to see life abroad, and to state (as he truthfully could) that neither talent nor industry were lacking in his character, the statement obtained for Joseph PLANTA the secretaryship of legation at Brussels. There, he felt himself to be in an element which suited him; but his filial affection brought him back to England in 1773, in order that he might solace the last days, on earth, of his father. In that year the elder PLANTA died.

It was also in 1773 that Joseph PLANTA became an Assistant-Librarian. In the next year he was appointed to succeed Dr. MATY in both of his then offices. At the Royal Society he succeeded him as Secretary; at the Museum, he succeeded him as an Under-Librarian—when the Doctor was made head of the establishment. His new post at the Museum brought to PLANTA the special charge of the Department of MSS.

Joseph PLANTA had already made—immediately after his first appointment as Assistant-Librarian—his outset in authorship by the publication of his _Account of the Romansch Language_. [Sidenote: _Phil. Trans._, vol. lxvi, pp. 129–160.] It is a scholarly production, though (it need hardly be said) not what would be expected, on such a subject, after the immense stride made in linguistical studies during the ninety-five years which have elapsed since it was given to literature, in pages in which nowadays such a treatise would hardly be looked for. Its first appearance was in the _Philosophical Transactions_. In 1776 it was translated into German and printed at Chamouni.

The subsequent years were devoted, almost exclusively, to the proper duties of his Museum office—on the days of service—and to those of the Paymastership of Exchequer Bills, a function to which Mr. PLANTA was appointed in 1788, and the duties of which he discharged, with efficiency and honour, for twenty-three years. Authorship had but little of his time until a much later period of life.

A little before his appointment in the administrative service of the country, PLANTA had married Miss Elizabeth ATWOOD. For him, marriage did just the opposite of what it has, now and then, been said to do for some other men. It took off the edge of his liking for foreign travel. For it gave him a very happy home. Their union endured for twenty-four years. PLANTA was not a man of the gushing sort. [Sidenote: Falkenstein, _Zeitgenossen_, &c., Dritte Reihe, Bd. ii, pp. 3, seqq.] But, to intimates, he would say—in the lonely years; there were to be but few of them—‘She was an angel in spirit and in heart.’ Mrs. PLANTA died in 1821.

On the death of Charles MORTON, Mr. PLANTA, as we have seen already, was made Principal-Librarian. He found the Museum still in its infancy, although no less than forty-six years had passed since the bequest of Sir Hans SLOANE was made to the British Public, and more than forty years since that Public had entered upon its inheritance. The collections had kept pace with the growth of science only in one or two departments. In others the arrear was enormous. The accessibility was hampered with restrictions. The building was in pressing need of enlargement, gradual as had been the growth of some sections, and glaring as was the deficiency of other sections.

PLANTA put his shoulders to the wheel, and met with support and encouragement from several of the Trustees. But the feeling still ran strongly against any approach to indiscriminate publicity in any department of the Museum. Men did not carry that restrictive view quite so far in 1800, as it had been expressed by Dr. John WARD—an able and good man—in 1760, and earlier; but they still looked with apprehension upon the combined ideas of a crowd of visitors, and irreplaceable treasures of learning and of art. A good many of the men of 1800 possessed, it must in candour be remembered, living recollections of the sights and the deeds of 1780. Residents in Bloomsbury were likely, on that score, to have particularly good memories. They had seen with their eyes precious manuscripts, which treasured up the life-long lore of a MANSFIELD, given by the populace to the flames.

Under the influence of such memories as these, Mr. PLANTA had to propose abolition of restrictions, with a gentle and very gradual hand. He began by improving the practice, without at first greatly altering the rules. By and by he brought, from time to time, before the Trust, suggestions for relaxations in the rules themselves.

[Sidenote: IMPROVEMENTS INTRODUCED, OR RECOMMENDED, BY JOSEPH PLANTA, IN
THE INTERNAL ECONOMY OF THE MUSEUM.]

From the outset he administered the Reading-Room itself with much liberality. When he became Principal-Librarian the yearly admissions were much under two hundred. In 1816, they had increased to two hundred and ninety-two. In 1820, to five hundred and fifteen. As respects the Department of Antiquities, the students admitted to draw were in 1809 less than twenty; in 1818 two hundred and twenty-three were admitted. In 1814 he recommended the Trustees to make provision for the exhibition every Thursday, ‘to persons applying to see them,’ the Engravings and Prints;—the persons admitted not exceeding six at any one time, and others being admitted in due succession. He also recommended a somewhat similar system of exhibition for adoption in the Department of Coins and Medals. And the Trustees gave effect to both recommendations. Eventually Mr. PLANTA proposed, for the _general_ show Collections of the Museum, a system of entirely free admission at the instant of application, abolishing all the hamper of preliminary forms.

[Sidenote: HIS RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE ENLARGEMENT OF THE VARIOUS
COLLECTIONS.]

It was also, I believe, at Mr. PLANTA’S instance, or partly so, that the Trustees applied to Parliament, in 1812, for special grants to enable them to improve the Collection of Printed Books, with reference more particularly to the endeavour to perfect the National Library in the National History—to that very limited extent to which the monuments and memorials of our history are to be found in print. Virtually, the grants on behalf of the Manuscript Department, not those on behalf of the Printed Book Department, were, in 1812, as they still are in 1870, the grants which mainly tend to make the British Museum what, most obviously, it ought to become, the main storehouse of British History and Archæology, both in literature and in art.

The magnificent additions made by private donors to every section of the British Museum during the administration of PLANTA, have been sufficiently passed under review in the closing chapters of Book II. Several of them, it has been seen, were the fruits of the public spirit of individual Trustees. Such gifts amply vindicated the wisdom both of Sir Hans SLOANE and of Parliament, when both Founder and Legislature gave to men of exalted position a preference as peculiarly fit, in the judgment of each, for the general guardianship of the Museum.

[Sidenote: HIS CATHOLICITY OF TASTES AND SYMPATHIES.]

But private gifts—munificent as they were—left large gaps in the National Collections. It is one of Mr. PLANTA’S distinctive merits that his tastes and sympathies embraced the Natural History Department, as well as those literary departments with which, as a man of letters, he had a more direct personal connection. He supported, with his influence, the wise recommendation to Parliament—made in 1810—for the purchase of the GREVILLE Collection of Minerals. He recommended, in 1822, the purchase, from the representatives of the naturalist MONTICELLI, of a like, though minor Collection, which had been formed at Naples. The Cavaliero MONTICELLI’S Collection was, in the main, one that had been undertaken in imitation of an earlier assemblage of volcanic products which had been also gathered at Naples by Sir William HAMILTON, and by the Collector given (as I have already recorded) to the Trustees. In a similar spirit he promoted the acquisitions which were made from time to time, by the instrumentality of Claudius RICH, of Henry SALT, and of several other workers in the fruitful field of Classical, Assyrian, and Egyptian archæological exploration. Both in the literary and scientific departments of the Museum he also gave some special attention to the due continuance and completion of the various collections bestowed on the Public by the munificence of Sir Joseph BANKS.

Another conspicuous merit belongs to Joseph PLANTA. He supported the Trustees in that wise and large-minded policy which induced them to regard _publication_, as well as accumulation, to be one of the chief duties of their Trust for the Nation. He thought it not enough, for example, to show to groups of Londoners, from time to time, and to occasional foreign visitants, in almost solitary state, the wealth of Nature and of Art in the Museum Collections. He saw it to be no less the duty of the faithful trustees of such treasures to show them to the world at large by the combined labours of the painter, the draughtsman, the engraver, and the printer. [Sidenote: PLANTA’S LABOURS ON THE MUSEUM’S PUBLICATIONS;] It will ever be an honourable distinction—in the briefest record of his Museum labours—that he promoted the publication of the beautiful volumes entitled _Description of the Ancient Marbles in the British Museum_; of the _Catalogue of the Anglo-Gallic Coins_; of the _Mausoleum and Cinerary Urns_; of the _Description of Terra Cottas_; and other like works. The first-named work in particular is an especial honour to the Trustees of the Museum, and to all who were concerned in its production. Beautifully engraved, and ably edited, it made the archæological treasures of the Nation widely known even to such foreigners, interested in the study of antiquity, as circumstances precluded from ever seeing the marbles themselves. When watching—in the bygone years—the late Henry CORBOULD busy at the work into which he threw so much of his love, as well as of his skill in drawing, I have been tempted, now and then, to envy the craft which, in its results, made our national possessions familiarly known, in the far parts of the world, to students who could never hope to see the wonderful handicraft of the old Greek sculptors, otherwise than as it is reflected and transmitted by the handicraft of the skilled modern draughtsman. CORBOULD had the eye to see artistic beauty and the soul to enjoy it. He was not one of the artists who are artisans, in everything but the name. In the ‘_Ancient Marbles in the British Museum_,’ published under the active encouragement of the Trustees and of their Principal-Librarians, during a long series of years, CORBOULD, as draughtsman, had just the work for which Nature had pre-eminently fitted him.

[Sidenote: AND, PARTICULARLY, ON THE CATALOGUES.]

Joseph PLANTA also took his share in the compilation of the Catalogues both of Printed Books and of Manuscripts. In this department, as in the archæological one, he extended the benefits of his zealous labour to the scholar abroad as well as to the scholar at home. What was carefully prepared was liberally _printed_ and liberally circulated. PLANTA wrote with his own hand part of the published _Catalogue of the Printed Books_, and much of the _Catalogue of the Cottonian Manuscripts_. To the latter he prefixed a brief life of the Founder, by which I have gladly and thankfully profited in my own more extended labour at the beginning of this volume.

One incidental employment which Mr. PLANTA’S office entailed upon him—as Principal-Librarian—was of a less grateful kind. It merits notice on more than one account, very trivial as is the incident of Museum history that occasioned it, when looked at intrinsically.

In 1821, the then Duke of BEDFORD (John, ninth Duke) filed in Chancery an injunction against the Trustees to restrain them from building on the garden-ground of the Museum. [Sidenote: THE GARDENS OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE DUKE OF BEDFORD.] To build was—at that time—an undoubted injury to the Bloomsburians, and, consequently, a not less undoubted depreciation of the Duke’s estate. It is hard, nowadays, to realise to one’s fancy what the former Museum gardens were in the olden time. They not only adorned every house that looked over them, but were—in practice, and by the indulgence of the Trustees and officers—a sort of small public park for the refreshment of the vicinity at large. Their neighbourhood made houses more valuable in the market.

Almost seventy years before the filing of the Chancery injunctions of 1820–21, a predecessor of the Duke (John, seventh Duke) had compelled Parliament—and with great reason—to enact that the ‘New Road’ should be made a broad road; not a narrow lane. He had carried a proviso for the construction of gardens in front of all the houses along the road. Were public property, and public enjoyments, protected by English law with one tenth part of the efficiency with which private property and private enjoyments are protected, that clause in the ‘New Road Act’ of 1750 would have proved, in our own present day, a measure advantageous to public health. But public easements are unknown, or nearly unknown, to English law. And the Duke’s clause has come, in course of time, to teem with public nuisance, instead of public benefit. Englishmen build at the national cost magnificent cathedrals, and then permit railway-jobbers to defile them, at pleasure, with railway ‘architecture.’ They construct, by dint of large taxation, magnificent river-embankments, and permit every sort of smoke-belching chimney and eye-killing corrugated-iron-monstrosity to spoil the view. What the old Duke of BEDFORD intended to make a metropolitan improvement, as well as a defence to his own property, has come to be a cause of public detriment,—simply because our legislation, in the year of Grace 1870, affords protection to no kind of public property that is insusceptible, by its nature, of direct valuation in pounds and pence.

The action of the ninth Duke of BEDFORD was in contrast with that of his predecessor. It was not altogether selfish, since there was an actual abatement of public enjoyment in that step which he was opposing. The Trustees of the British Museum were really compelled to take something from the Public with one hand;—but, with the other, they gave a tenfold equivalent. Their contention, of course, prevailed against the Duke’s opposition.

It may not be intrusive here to mention that it is known that by the present Duke of BEDFORD very generous and liberal furtherance would be given to new schemes of extension for the Museum, were Parliament, on full consideration, to think enlargement at Bloomsbury the right course to be taken in pending matters. But this subject will demand a few words hereafter.

PLANTA’S energies seem for several years to have been given, almost exclusively, to his Museum duties, in combination (as was perfectly practicable and befitting, under the then circumstances) with his Exchequer Paymastership. But in the closing years of his Under-Librarianship many months were (not less fitly) given to a worthy literary undertaking. He wrote his _History of the Helvetic Confederacy_ towards the end of the last century, and published it soon after his appointment to the Principal-Librarianship. In the next year he published a supplement to it, under the title of _A View of the Restoration of the Helvetic Confederacy_. The _History_ reached its second edition in 1807.

Based primarily on the great work of Johannes VON MÜLLER, PLANTA’S _History of the Helvetic Confederacy_ is both a very able production and one that is animated by a spirit of patriotism which is wise as well as strong. It was an enduring contribution to the literature of the author’s fatherland. After its appearance, his official duties mainly engrossed his attention. He died, full of years and honours, in the year 1827, leaving a son, who, like his father and his grandfather, distinguished himself in the civil service of their adopted country.

Joseph PLANTA, in his fifty-three years of service, had seen the British Museum pass from its infancy into the early stages of its maturity. But it still, at the time of his death, was too much regarded, both by the general Public and by Parliament, as, in the main, a place of popular amusement. His next successor saw the beginning of further improvements, such as lifted the Museum upon a level with the best of its fellow-institutions in all Europe. His second successor saw it lifted far above them, in several points of view. And what he witnessed of augmented improvement—when leaving office three or four years ago—was, in a very large measure, the result of his own zealous labours and of his eminent ability.