At that date the Department of Printed Books was under the charge of the Rev. Henry Hervey Baber (the eminent editor of the ‘Alexandrian MS.’ of the Septuagint). He was assisted by Mr. Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, and also by Mr. Walter, who had been one of the Librarians of King George the Third, and who, in 1831, was succeeded by Mr. Antonio Panizzi. In the Department of MSS. Mr. Ellis’s Assistant-Keeper, the Rev. Josiah Forshall, had succeeded to the charge, and the new Keeper had the able assistance of Sir Frederick Madden, whose labours for the improvement of his department are well known to scholars. The Antiquities were confided to Mr. Edward Hawkins; the various Natural History Collections to Messrs. König and Children. The Botanical Department was, as I have shown at the close of the preceding Book, just about to be reorganized (almost to be created) by the transfer of the Collections of Sir Joseph Banks, and with them of the services of their distinguished Keeper. Taken altogether, such a staff as this was of threefold efficiency to that with which Mr. Planta had started at the beginning of the century.
Mr. Ellis enjoyed an additional advantage from the great familiarity with the whole service of the Museum which he had acquired during his labours as Secretary from the year 1814. The secretarial duty had been combined with the functions of keepership during thirteen years. Great punctuality, a conspicuous faculty for method and memory, and very courteous manners, were qualifications which are not always, or necessarily, found in union with conspicuous industry. In him they were combined. Nevertheless, he narrowly escaped losing the merited reward of long and assiduous labours. For he had a formidable competitor.
The Candidature of Mr. H. Fynes Clinton.
At this time, a most accomplished scholar, who deservedly possessed large influence, both social and political, had obtained the virtual promise of almost the highest personage in the realm that whenever Mr. Planta died he should receive the offer of successorship. Mr. Henry Fynes Clinton, in those quiet ante-reform days, had been able, for twenty years, to unite the functions of a Member of Parliament with the assiduous pursuits of scholarship in one of its highest forms. Learning had higher charms for him than Politics, and he had no turn for debate, but he had steadily attended the House of Commons while giving to the world his Fasti Hellenici and Fasti Romani. Six months before Mr. Planta’s decease, the Archbishop of Canterbury had, in effect, promised Mr. Fynes Clinton that he would nominate him to be Principal-Librarian, and the Archbishop well knew that, as far as learning went, such an appointment would be applauded throughout Europe. The Archbishop (Dr. Charles Manners Sutton), did not forget his promise, and his vote carried that of the then Speaker of the House of Commons, who was the Archbishop’s son. Their joint communication with the Lord Chancellor procured his assent also. ‘We have made,’ the Archbishop told Mr. Fynes Clinton, ‘your recommendation to the King as strong as possible.’ The practice, as the reader will perhaps remember, was that the then Principal Trustees should in all such cases recommend to the Sovereign two names, with such observations upon them as to those Trustees might seem appropriate.
Letters and Journ. of H. Fynes Clinton, in the Literary Remains (1854), pass.
As Mr. Ellis was now the senior officer; had had the care successively of two several departments (MSS. and Printed Books); had also served as Secretary, and, in all these employments, had acquitted himself with diligence and credit, there could, of course, be no difficulty as to the name which should be submitted to George the Fourth in company with that of Mr. Fynes Clinton. Other Trustees interested themselves in supporting, indirectly but efficiently, the claims of one who had served the Board so long. And the King was pleased to prefer the second name which had been placed before him by the Principal Trustees rather than the first. |Lord Lansdowne to Archbishop of Canterbury; 20 December, 1827.| Lord Lansdowne received His Majesty’s commands to signify to the Archbishop that it was upon the ground of ‘long service in the Museum’ that the King had made his choice.
Services and character of Sir H. Ellis.
Those who had (like the writer) opportunity to watch, during most of the succeeding thirty years, the continuance of that service, know that the King’s selection was justified. Sir Henry Ellis was not gifted with any of those salient abilities which dazzle the eyes of men; but he had great power of labour, the strictest integrity of purpose, and a very kind heart. He was ever, to the Trustees, a faithful servant, up to the full measure of his ability. To those who worked under him he was always courteous, considerate, and very often he was generous. He would sometimes expose himself to misconstruction, in order to appease discords. He would at times rather seem wanting in firmness of will than, by pressing his authority, wound the feelings of well-intentioned but irritable subordinates. No one could receive from him a merited reproof—I speak from personal experience—without perceiving that the duty of giving it was felt to be a painful duty. The Commissioners of 1850 had ample warrant for hinting, in their Report to the Crown—when alluding to certain internal disputes—that the qualities least abounding in Sir Henry Ellis’s composition were those which equip a man |Report (1850) p. 32.| ‘for such harsher duties of his office, as cannot be accomplished by the aid of conciliatory manners, the index of a benevolent disposition.’
A man of that temper will now and then, in his own despite, get forced into a somewhat bitter controversy. One sharp attack on Sir Henry’s administration of his Principal-Librarianship had a close connection with discords of an anterior date which had broken out in the Society of Antiquaries. |The story of the MSS. at Pomard.| The late Sir Harris Nicolas would scarcely have criticised, with so much vehemence, what he thought to have been a careless indifference on Ellis’s part to the acquisition for the British Museum of an important body of historical manuscripts, preserved in a chateau in a distant corner of France (and offered to the Trustees in 1829), but for the circumstance that Sir Henry’s kindly unwillingness, evinced a little while before, to desert a very weak colleague at Somerset House had stood in the way of some much-needed reforms in that quarter. Without in the least intending beforehand to represent things unfairly, Sir H. Nicolas acted under the influence of an unconscious bias or pre-judgment. The Joursanvault story is still worth telling, although it has now become an old story, and one portion of the historical treasures it relates to are now past wishing for, as an English possession.
In the course of the revolutionary convulsions in France, a great body of historical documents had been abstracted from the famous old Castle of Blois. Eventually, as years passed on, they found their way into the country-seat, at Pomard, of the Baron de Joursanvault, and with them were amalgamated an extensive collection of old family papers, many books on genealogy, and some choice illuminated missals.