I made but two brief visits to the British Museum, and I can easily instruct my reader so that he will have no difficulty, if he will follow my teaching, in learning how not to see it.  When he has a spare hour at his disposal, let him drop in at the Museum, and wander among its books and its various collections.  He will know as much about it as the fly that buzzes in at one window and out at another.  If I were asked whether I brought away anything from my two visits, I should say, Certainly I did.  The fly sees some things, not very intelligently, but he cannot help seeing them.  The great round reading-room, with its silent students, impressed me very much.  I looked at once for the Elgin Marbles, but casts and photographs and engravings had made me familiar with their chief features.  I thought I knew something of the sculptures brought from Nineveh, but I was astonished, almost awe-struck, at the sight of those mighty images which mingled with the visions of the Hebrew prophets.  I did not marvel more at the skill and labor expended upon them by the Assyrian artists than I did at the enterprise and audacity which had brought them safely from the mounds under which they were buried to the light of day and the heart of a great modern city.  I never thought that I should live to see the Birs Nimroud laid open, and the tablets in which the history of Nebuchadnezzar was recorded spread before me.  The Empire of the Spade in the world of history was founded at Nineveh by Layard, a great province added to it by Schliemann, and its boundary extended by numerous explorers, some of whom are diligently at work at the present day.  I feel very grateful that many of its revelations have been made since I have been a tenant of the travelling residence which holds so many secrets in its recesses.

There is one lesson to be got from a visit of an hour or two to the British Museum,—­namely, the fathomless abyss of our own ignorance.  One is almost ashamed of his little paltry heartbeats in the presence of the rushing and roaring torrent of Niagara.  So if he has published a little book or two, collected a few fossils, or coins, or vases, he is crushed by the vastness of the treasures in the library and the collections of this universe of knowledge.

I have shown how 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.