Library Collections: Document: Full Text

The British Museum is a national institution, founded and supported by the revenues and the government of an empire. The American Museum of the future will be such another, and even more worthily lodged. It would be good taste if all local institutions, whether belonging to individuals, to companies, to cities, or to States, would adopt names less inappropriate to their natures. But as long as we have American institutes of various kinds, and American companies of many sorts, all incorporated under State laws and limited to their spheres of action by State boundaries, such observance of fitness as we might desire we certainly cannot hope for. Let New York City, then, create for itself an "American Museum." And let the thing itself be not unworthy of the name it rashly assumes.

By the perseverance and the intelligence of some, aided by a series of happy accidents, New York obtained a park, which was put into the hands of good managers and ingenious and conscientious artists, and was carried on by them to such a point of quasi completion that it can hardly be spoiled now, and is likely to remain for ever, to cause posterity to doubt the truth of the future historian's account of misgovernment and corruption in New York in the nineteenth century. Let us try to make out descendents still more incredulous on this point. Let us have a place of public instruction as well as of public enjoyment. Perhaps in the neighborhood of the Central Park itself would be the best place for it; let us establish it there, and try to draw encouragement and a stimulus to exertion from our beautiful neighbor.

Nearly every one who has travelled in Europe remembers something of European museums, even though it be but a shadowy image of them that his mind retains. Something of the wonders contained in that sombre temple in Great Russell Street, and something of the artistic treasures "put out of sight under the shadowy vaults of Kensington;" something of the Louvre and the Garden of Plants; something of the Green Vaults of Dresden, of the half-score museums of Berlin, and of the various Sammlungen of Munich -- remains to help furnish forth everybody's pleasant reminiscences of his European trip. But perhaps there are few who have thought of this, that a museum should include, to be perfect -- that any museum may include -- all the different collections of all the different kinds. As a good example, more apt to be known to our readers than another, let us take the national collections in London.

The British Museum contains the following collections: 1st, the collection of manuscripts, to guard which the "Trustees of the British Museum" were first incorporated in 1753, and which was first exhibited in 1759; 2d, the library, at first small, increased to many times its original size by bequest of George IV., and now the second library in Europe in size, and the first in practical value -- open to the public under wise restrictions, nearly six hundred thousand volumes strong, furnished with the best reading-room in the world, and rich in a world of curiosities and artistic treasures; 3d, the collections of natural history, divided into zoology, fossils, minerals, and botany, magnificent in every department and subdivision, and unequalled in many; 4th, the collection of portraits of sovereigns and famous men, now hung on the walls of the zoological galleries; 5th, the collection of antiquities -- Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, and British -- including in its glorious assembling together of riches the famous Elgin Marbles, the Ninevite and other sculptures of Layard's and Rich's discovery, and the best collection in Europe of the oldest art of all, the art of Egypt; 6th, the ethnographical collection. These are under one roof, not large enough now to cover aright the overgrown and still growing collections.

Not far to the west of the British Museum is that ugly building in Trafalgar Square of which one-half is devoted to the Royal Academy of Arts and the other half to the "National Gallery -- Foreign Schools." This collection of pictures, but a few years inferior to the collection of any great European capitals, has been enlarged within a few years, by great watchfulness and lavish expense, to respectable size and immense value. The English pictures, or part of them, were once in the same galleries, but they have gone still further west.

The "National Gallery -- British School" is housed at South Kensington, in the upper story of an unpretending and purely utilitarian building of iron, or series of buildings rather, which bears the local, alliterative, but very appropriate name, "The Brompton Boilers." This name, Brompton, contended with the name of its neighbor village, South Kensington, for the honor of entitling the new region of the expanding metropolis and the national museum is contained. South Kensington has won, but the rival name is preserved in the popular appellation of the range of ugly buildings which are so fair within.