ow not to see the British museum; I will tell how to see
it.

Take lodgings next door to it,--in a garret, if you cannot afford
anything better,--and pass all your days at the Museum during the whole
period of your natural life. At threescore and ten you will have some
faint conception of the contents, significance, and value of this great
British institution, which is as nearly as any one spot the _noeud
vital_ of human civilization, a stab at which by the dagger of
anarchy would fitly begin the reign of chaos.

On the 3d of August, a gentleman, Mr. Wedmore, who had promised to be my
guide to certain interesting localities, called for me, and we took a
hansom for the old city. The first place we visited was the Temple, a
collection of buildings with intricate passages between them, some of
the edifices reminding me of our college dormitories. One, however, was
a most extraordinary exception,--the wonderful Temple church, or rather
the ancient part of it which is left, the round temple. We had some
trouble to get into it, but at last succeeded in finding a slip of a
girl, the daughter of the janitor, who unlocked the door for us. It
affected my imagination strangely to see this girl of a dozen years old,
or thereabouts, moving round among the monuments which had kept their
place there for some six or seven hundred years; for the church was
built in the year 1185, and the most recent of the crusaders' monuments
is said to date as far back as 1241. Their effigies have lain in this
vast city, and passed unharmed through all its convulsions. The Great
Fire must have crackled very loud in their stony ears, and they must
have shaken day and night, as the bodies of the victims of the Plague
were rattled over the pavements.

Near the Temple church, in a green spot among the buildings, a plain
stone laid flat on the turf bears these words: "Here lies Oliver
Goldsmith." I believe doubt has been thrown upon the statement that
Goldsmith was buried in that place, but, as some poet ought to have
written,

Where doubt is disenchantment
'Tis wisdom to believe.

We do not "drop a tear" so often as our Della Cruscan predecessors, but
the memory of the author of the "Vicar of Wakefield" stirred my feelings
more than a whole army of crusaders would have done. A pretty rough set
of filibusters they were, no doubt.

The whole group to which Goldsmith belonged came up before me, and as
the centre of that group the great Dr. Johnso