o use the phrase of the
trustees, bespoke not the gentility of that vulgar age. In those days
the weaver and the carpenter would as soon have contemplated a visit
to St. James's Palace as have hoped for an admission ticket to the
national museum.

These mean precautions of the last century, contrast happily with the
enlightened liberty of this. Crowds of all ranks and conditions
besiege the doors of the British Museum, especially in holiday times,
yet the skeleton of the elephant is spotless, and the bottled
rattlesnakes continue to pickle in peace. The Elgin marbles have
suffered no abatement of their marvellous beauties; and the coat of
the cameleopard is with out a blemish. The Yorkshireman has his
unrestrained stare at Sesostris; the undertaker spends his holiday
over the mummies, and no official suppresses his professional
objections to the coffins. The weaver observes the looms of the olden
time: the soldier compares the Indian's blunt instrument with his own
keen and deadly bayonet. The poor needlewoman enjoys her laugh at the
rude sewing-instruments of barbarous tribes: the stone-mason perhaps
compares his tombs with the sarcophagi of ancient masters. No
attendant is deputed to dog the heels of five visitors and to watch
them with the cold eye of a gaoler; no bell warns the company from one
spot to another: all is open--free!

Through the bright new galleries of Sir Robert Smirke, crowded with
the natural productions of every clime, the printed thoughts of the
greatest and best men, the marvellous art of forgotten ages, and the
poor barbarisms of savage life, we propose to conduct the visitor, in

FOUR DISTINCT VISITS.

VISIT THE FIRST.

On arriving in front of the British Museum for the first time, the
visitor will not fail to notice the Grecian Ionic facade, ornamented
with forty-four columns, and rising at its extreme point to the height
of sixty-six feet. The sculpture which decorates the tympanum of the
portico is the work of Sir Richard Westmacott, and is an allegorical
representation of the progress of civilisation. The spiritual
influences that have successively worked upon the savage natures of
the dark ages, have here distinct types. Religion tames the savage;
Paganism makes him a crouching sensualist; the Egyptian sees a God in
the stars of heaven; and then the mathematician, the musician, the
poet, and the painter set to work, and these prophets of mysterious
beauties realise civilis