The water, thirsting, and near Heaven.’
[28]. It is necessary that I should state, with precision, the sources of the information conveyed in the text. I rely, chiefly, on three several sources, one of which is publicly accessible. My main knowledge of the matter rests (first) upon the Minutes of Evidence taken by Lord Ellesmere’s Commission of 1848–1850; (secondly) upon conversations with the late Mr. Edward Hawkins, held in July and August, 1837, not long after the appearance of Mr. Cary’s letter in The Times; (thirdly) upon a conversation, on the same subject, with which I was honoured by Sir Henry Ellis in 1839.
[29]. I believe that his earliest contribution consisted of some articles entitled ‘Notes of a Reader,’ published in 1830, in a periodical (long since defunct) called The Spirit of Literature. These were written and printed long before Mr. Watts became a correspondent of the Mechanics’ Magazine, as mentioned in the text.
[30]. In Minutes of Evidence (page 596) printed erroneously ‘reasonable.’ To the brief extract, for which alone I can here afford space, were appended, in the original Report, many pertinent amplifications and illustrations. Some of these are given in the Minutes of Evidence above referred to.
[31]. The ‘successor’ referred to is Mr. Winter Jones, then Keeper of Printed Books, now Principal-Librarian of the British Museum.
[32]. Birch, Ancient Pottery, vol. i, pp. 209, 210.
[33]. If the question of mere hints and analogies in construction were to be followed out to its issues, the result, I feel assured, would in no degree tend to strengthen the contention of Mr. Hosking’s pamphlet. Something like a first germ of the mere ground-plan of the new Reading-Room may, perhaps, be found in M. Benjamin Delessert’s Projet d’une Bibliothèque circulaire, printed, at Paris, as far back as the year 1835, when the question of reconstructing the then ‘Royal,’ now ‘Imperial Library,’ was under discussion in the French Chambers. ‘I propose,’ says Delessert, ‘to place the officers and the readers in the centre of a vast rotunda, whence branch off eight principal galleries, the walls of which form diverging radii ... and have book-cases on both sides,’ &c. His plan may be thus shown, in small. The differences, it will be seen, between this sketch and Mr. Panizzi’s sketch of 1854, are greater than are the resemblances.
[34]. Namely, two millions five hundred and twenty-seven thousand two hundred and sixteen visits, which included seventy-eight thousand two hundred and eleven visits to the Reading-Room for study.
[35]. In—unless a memory more than thirty years old deceive me—that noble masterpiece of English prose, the ‘Citation of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing’ (1835).