His recommendations for the enlargement of the various Collections.
It was also, I believe, at Mr. Planta’s instance, or partly so, that the Trustees applied to Parliament, in 1812, for special grants to enable them to improve the Collection of Printed Books, with reference more particularly to the endeavour to perfect the National Library in the National History—to that very limited extent to which the monuments and memorials of our history are to be found in print. Virtually, the grants on behalf of the Manuscript Department, not those on behalf of the Printed Book Department, were, in 1812, as they still are in 1870, the grants which mainly tend to make the British Museum what, most obviously, it ought to become, the main storehouse of British History and Archæology, both in literature and in art.
The magnificent additions made by private donors to every section of the British Museum during the administration of Planta, have been sufficiently passed under review in the closing chapters of Book II. Several of them, it has been seen, were the fruits of the public spirit of individual Trustees. Such gifts amply vindicated the wisdom both of Sir Hans Sloane and of Parliament, when both Founder and Legislature gave to men of exalted position a preference as peculiarly fit, in the judgment of each, for the general guardianship of the Museum.
His catholicity of tastes and sympathies.
But private gifts—munificent as they were—left large gaps in the National Collections. It is one of Mr. Planta’s distinctive merits that his tastes and sympathies embraced the Natural History Department, as well as those literary departments with which, as a man of letters, he had a more direct personal connection. He supported, with his influence, the wise recommendation to Parliament—made in 1810—for the purchase of the Greville Collection of Minerals. He recommended, in 1822, the purchase, from the representatives of the naturalist Monticelli, of a like, though minor Collection, which had been formed at Naples. The Cavaliero Monticelli’s Collection was, in the main, one that had been undertaken in imitation of an earlier assemblage of volcanic products which had been also gathered at Naples by Sir William Hamilton, and by the Collector given (as I have already recorded) to the Trustees. In a similar spirit he promoted the acquisitions which were made from time to time, by the instrumentality of Claudius Rich, of Henry Salt, and of several other workers in the fruitful field of Classical, Assyrian, and Egyptian archæological exploration. Both in the literary and scientific departments of the Museum he also gave some special attention to the due continuance and completion of the various collections bestowed on the Public by the munificence of Sir Joseph Banks.
Another conspicuous merit belongs to Joseph Planta. He supported the Trustees in that wise and large-minded policy which induced them to regard publication, as well as accumulation, to be one of the chief duties of their Trust for the Nation. He thought it not enough, for example, to show to groups of Londoners, from time to time, and to occasional foreign visitants, in almost solitary state, the wealth of Nature and of Art in the Museum Collections. He saw it to be no less the duty of the faithful trustees of such treasures to show them to the world at large by the combined labours of the painter, the draughtsman, the engraver, and the printer. |Planta’s Labours on the Museum’s Publications;| It will ever be an honourable distinction—in the briefest record of his Museum labours—that he promoted the publication of the beautiful volumes entitled Description of the Ancient Marbles in the British Museum; of the Catalogue of the Anglo-Gallic Coins; of the Mausoleum and Cinerary Urns; of the Description of Terra Cottas; and other like works. The first-named work in particular is an especial honour to the Trustees of the Museum, and to all who were concerned in its production. Beautifully engraved, and ably edited, it made the archæological treasures of the Nation widely known even to such foreigners, interested in the study of antiquity, as circumstances precluded from ever seeing the marbles themselves. When watching—in the bygone years—the late Henry Corbould busy at the work into which he threw so much of his love, as well as of his skill in drawing, I have been tempted, now and then, to envy the craft which, in its results, made our national possessions familiarly known, in the far parts of the world, to students who could never hope to see the wonderful handicraft of the old Greek sculptors, otherwise than as it is reflected and transmitted by the handicraft of the skilled modern draughtsman. Corbould had the eye to see artistic beauty and the soul to enjoy it. He was not one of the artists who are artisans, in everything but the name. In the ‘Ancient Marbles in the British Museum,’ published under the active encouragement of the Trustees and of their Principal-Librarians, during a long series of years, Corbould, as draughtsman, had just the work for which Nature had pre-eminently fitted him.
and, particularly, on the Catalogues.
Joseph Planta also took his share in the compilation of the Catalogues both of Printed Books and of Manuscripts. In this department, as in the archæological one, he extended the benefits of his zealous labour to the scholar abroad as well as to the scholar at home. What was carefully prepared was liberally printed and liberally circulated. Planta wrote with his own hand part of the published Catalogue of the Printed Books, and much of the Catalogue of the Cottonian Manuscripts. To the latter he prefixed a brief life of the Founder, by which I have gladly and thankfully profited in my own more extended labour at the beginning of this volume.
One incidental employment which Mr. Planta’s office entailed upon him—as Principal-Librarian—was of a less grateful kind. It merits notice on more than one account, very trivial as is the incident of Museum history that occasioned it, when looked at intrinsically.
In 1821, the then Duke of Bedford (John, ninth Duke) filed in Chancery an injunction against the Trustees to restrain them from building on the garden-ground of the Museum. |The Gardens of the British Museum and the Duke of Bedford.| To build was—at that time—an undoubted injury to the Bloomsburians, and, consequently, a not less undoubted depreciation of the Duke’s estate. It is hard, nowadays, to realise to one’s fancy what the former Museum gardens were in the olden time. They not only adorned every house that looked over them, but were—in practice, and by the indulgence of the Trustees and officers—a sort of small public park for the refreshment of the vicinity at large. Their neighbourhood made houses more valuable in the market.