These regulations secured the exclusive attendance of the upper classes.  The libraries were hoarded for the particular enjoyment of the worm, whose feast was only at rare intervals disturbed by some student regardless of difficulties.  To the poor, worn, unheeded authors of those days, serenely starving in garrets, assuredly the British Museum must have been as impenetrable as a Bastille.  We imagine the prim under-librarian glancing with a supercilious expression upon the names and addresses of many poor, aspiring, honourable men—­men, whose “condition,” to 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