Letters on high themes like these had their frequent variety, in the shape of proffers of contributions, to be made upon terms, for the enlargement of the Museum, the fame of which had now spread into very humble ranks of society. A single specimen in this kind will suffice: ‘I understand,’ wrote a correspondent of a speculative turn, ‘you are a great virtuoso, and gives a valuable consideration for novelties of antiquity,’—on getting thus far in the perusal, one can imagine Sir Hans murmuring ‘not willingly, I assure you,’—‘a pin has been many hundred years in our family, and was, I am told, the pin of the first Saxon king of the West Angles,’ and so on.
Acquisition of the Manor of Chelsea.
Until the year 1741, a few months after his resignation of the chair of the Royal Society on the score of old age, Sir Hans Sloane continued to live chiefly in London; though often removing, for part of the summer months, to his Manor House in the then charming suburb of Chelsea. He had purchased that valuable manor, from the family of Cheyne, in 1714. The fine old House abounded in historical recollections and amongst them, as most readers will remember, in associations connected with the memory of Sir Thomas More. It had the additional attraction of a large and beautiful garden, close to that other garden in which the now Lord of the Manor had pursued, with all the energies of youth, the study of botany. One of his earliest acts of lordship had been a graceful gift to the Company of Apothecaries, of the freehold in the land of which till then they had been tenants. In 1741 he transferred his Museum and Library from Bloomsbury to Chelsea. His former house—situated in Great Russell Street, near the corner of what is now Bloomsbury Square—had been capacious, but the new one admitted of a greatly improved arrangement and display of the collections.
A Royal Visit to the Sloane Museum at Chelsea.
The state and character of the Sloane Museum, in the fullness to which the collector had brought it during these latest years of his life, can scarcely be exemplified better than in a contemporary account of a visit which was paid to the Manor House at Chelsea by the Prince and Princess of Wales, in the year 1748. I quote it, almost verbally, from the Gentleman’s Magazine of that year, but with some unimportant omissions.
G. M., vol. xviii, pp. 301, 302. (July, 1748.)
At that date, the Manor House formed a square of above a hundred feet on each side, enclosing a court. Three of the principal rooms were, on the occasion of this royal visit, filled successively—as the visitors passed from one room into another—with the finest portions of the collections in its most portable departments. The minerals were first shown. The tables were spread with drawers filled with all sorts of precious stones in their natural beds, as they are found in the earth, except the first table, which contained stones found in animals, such as pearls, bezoars, and the like. Emeralds, topazes, amethysts, sapphires, garnets, rubies, diamonds, ... with magnificent vessels of cornelian, onyx, sardonyx and jasper, delighted the eye, says the attendant describer, and raised the mind to praise the great Creator of all things.
When their Royal Highnesses, continues our narrator, had viewed one room, and went into another, the scene was shifted. When they returned, the same tables were covered, for a second course, with all sorts of jewels, polished and set after the modern fashion, and with gems carved and engraved. For the third course, the tables were spread with gold and silver ores, and with the most precious and remarkable ores used in the dresses of men from Siberia to the Cape of Good Hope, from Japan to Peru; and with both ancient and modern coins in gold and silver.
The gallery, a hundred and ten feet in length, presented a ‘surprising prospect.’ The most beautiful corals, crystals, and figured stones; the most brilliant insects; shells, painted with as great variety as the precious stones; and birds vying with the gems; diversified with remains of the antediluvian world.
Then a noble vista presented itself through several rooms filled with books; among these were many hundred volumes of dried plants; a room, full of choice and valuable manuscripts; and the rich present sent by the French King to Sir Hans of the engravings of his collections of paintings, medals, and statues, and of his Palaces, in twenty-five large atlas volumes.