the land of their
dearest enemies, there to be turned over to the trustees of the British
Museum.

The museum authorities were not slow to appreciate the value of the
treasures that had thus fallen into their hands, yet for the moment
it proved to them something of a white elephant. Montague Mansion was
already crowded; moreover, its floors had never been intended to hold
such heavy objects, so it became imperatively necessary to provide new
quarters for the collection. This was done in 1807 by the erection of
a new building on the old site. But the trustees of that day failed to
gauge properly the new impulse to growth that had come to the museum
with the Egyptian antiquities, for the new building was neither in
itself sufficient for the needs of the immediate future nor yet
so planned as to be susceptible of enlargement with reasonable
architectural effect. The mistakes were soon apparent, but, despite
various tentatives and "meditatings," fourteen years elapsed before
the present magnificent building was planned. The construction, wing by
wing, began in 1823, but it was not until 1846 that the last vestige
of the old museum buildings had vanished, and in their place, spreading
clear across the spacious site, stood a structure really worthy of the
splendid collection for which it was designed.

But no one who sees this building to-day would suspect its relative
youth. Half a century of London air can rival a cycle of Greece or Italy
in weathering effect, and the fine building of the British Museum
frowns out at the beholder to-day as grimy and ancient-seeming as if
its massive columns dated in fact from the old Grecian days which they
recall. Regardless of age, however, it is one of the finest and most
massive specimens of Ionic architecture in existence. Forty-four massive
columns, in double tiers, form its frontal colonnade, jutting forward
in a wing at either end. The flight of steps leading to the central
entrance is in itself one hundred and twenty-five feet in extent; the
front as a whole covers three hundred and seventy feet. Capping the
portico is a sculptured tympanum by Sir Richard Westmacott, representing
the "Progress of Civilization" not unworthily. As a whole, the building
is one of the few in London that are worth visiting for an inspection of
their exterior alone. It seems admirably designed to be, as it is, the
repository of one of the finest collections of Oriental and classical
antiquities in the