Dr. Morton was a native of Westmoreland, and was born in 1716. Until the year 1750 he had practised as a physician at Kendal. In 1751 he became a Licentiate of the College of Physicians, and in the following year a Fellow of the Royal Society. His service in the British Museum lasted from 1756 to 1799. There are several testimonies to the courtesy with which he treated such visitors and students as came under his personal notice, but his long term of superior office was certainly not marked by any striking improvement in the public economy of the Museum. And how much room for improvement existed there the reader has seen. Dr. Morton, like his predecessor, was one of the Secretaries of the Royal Society. He filled that office from the year 1760 to 1774. He contributed several papers to the Philosophical Transactions, as well on antiquarian subjects as on topics of physical science, and he was the first editor of Bulstrode Whitelocke’s remarkable narrative of his embassy to Sweden during the Protectorate. Morton’s writings are not remarkable either for vigour or for originality, but, on more topics than one, they had the useful result of setting abler men awork. He was three times married: (1) to Mary Berkeley, the niece of Swift’s frequent correspondent Lady Elizabeth Germaine; (2) to Lady Savile; (3) to Mrs. Elizabeth Pratt. He died on the 10th February, 1799.
Of his successors in the office of Principal Librarian some account will be found in the Introductory Chapter of Book III.
CHAPTER II.
A GROUP OF CLASSICAL ARCHÆOLOGISTS AND EXPLORERS.
‘The Archæologist cannot, like the Scholar, carry on his researches in his own Library, independent of outward circumstances. For his work of reference and collation he must travel, excavate, collect, arrange, delineate, transcribe, before he can place his whole subject before his mind....
‘A Museum of Antiquities is to the Archæologist what a Botanic Garden is to the Botanist. It presents his subject compendiously, synoptically, suggestively, not in the desultory and accidental order in which he would otherwise be brought into contact with its details.’—
C. T. Newton, On the Study of Archæology, p. 26.
Sir William Hamilton and his Pursuits and Employments in Italy.—The Acquisitions of the French Institute of Egypt, and the capture of part of them at Alexandria.—Charles Towneley and his Collection of Antiquities.—The Researches of the Earl of Elgin in Greece.—The Collections and Writings of Richard Payne Knight.
Book II, Chap. II. Classical Archæologists and Explorers.
To the comparatively small assemblage of antiquities which originally formed part of the Museum of Courten and of Sloane, several additions had been made—besides the coins, medals, and bronzes of Sir Robert Cotton—prior to the opening of the British Museum to the Public in 1759. Some of those additions were the gift, severally, of three members of the Lethieullier family. Others were the gift of Thomas Hollis, who became a constant benefactor to the Museum almost from the day of Sir Hans Sloane’s death to that of his own.
The Lethieullier antiquities had been chiefly gathered in Egypt. |The Egyptian Antiquities of the Lethieulliers.| The first gift was made by the Will of Colonel William Lethieullier, dated 23rd July, 1755. |MS. Addit., 6179, f. 29.| And the first catalogue of any kind which was prepared for the British Museum, after its acquisition by Parliament, was a list of these antiquities drawn up by Dr. John Ward, one of the Trustees. And here it may deserve remark that for many years after the foundation not a few of the Trustees took a large share in the actual work of preparing the Museum for public use, as well as in the ordinary duties of control and administration.