Allusion has already been made to Sir Henry Ellis, who was, at the time of which we write, Principal Librarian, having held this appointment since the 20th of December, 1827. In the year 1800, Mr. Ellis had entered the service of the British Museum as a Temporary Assistant; and Mr. Edwards, in his work entitled “Lives of the Founders of the British Museum,” observes that “had it never fallen to the lot of Henry Ellis to render to the public any service at all, in the way of administering and improving the National Museum,” he would still have earned an honourable niche in our literary history. His contributions to literature are, indeed, very unequal in their character. Some of them are fragmentary; some might be thought trivial. But very many of them have sterling value.[value.]
He died at the age of 92, on the 15th of January, 1869, having retired in 1856.
Between Panizzi and Sir Henry Ellis there was no reciprocal feeling of friendship; indeed, at times, the former expressed himself so strongly that we prefer not to reproduce his remarks. The first apparently inimical act was Panizzi’s decided objection to Sir Henry’s Printed Catalogue of the Museum Library; and we learn from a report, drawn up by Ellis, on the 30th April, 1834, and which Panizzi delighted in cutting up, that as soon as he (Ellis) was placed at the head of the Printed Books Department, in 1806, and Mr. Baber advanced to the post of Assistant-Keeper, the preparation of a new Alphabetical Catalogue of the Library was ordered by the Trustees, and the work undertaken by the two Librarians jointly. The former was answerable for the letters A to F, with P, Q, and R, and the latter for the remaining letters. It may be considered a bold statement, yet, this report, instead of containing a correct account of the whole undertaking, was full, from beginning to end, of the most inexact assertions: and these are clearly pointed out by Panizzi, in the shape of marginal notes; he, indeed, seemed most constant in his great delight of finding faults in the Printed Catalogue itself. On one occasion, whilst in search of a book, he came suddenly on an entry of a French translation of one of Jeremy Bentham’s works, in which the author’s name, having been translated in the title-page of the book into French, was transferred in the same form “Bentham (Jérôme)” into the Catalogue. Panizzi’s comment on the entry was: “In propria venit, et sui eum non receperunt,” a verse in the first chapter of St. John, from the Vulgate, which he may, probably, have learnt when a boy, acting as a server at mass, under his master the Abbate Fratuzzi; it is equally probable that he knew it in no other form. The sentence is an exact translation from the Greek εἰς τὰ ἴδια ἦλθε καὶ οἱ ἴδιοι αὐτὸν οὐ παρέλαβον
But the English version is not so; “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” Mr. Major, the present Keeper of Maps, in the British Museum, was at the time sitting in the same room with Panizzi, and seeing him point out the mistake committed by Sir Henry Ellis, in order to court enquiry exclaimed: “How do you account, Sir, for the words “in propria” being used instead of “ad suos” which might have been the version, had the English translation, the only one with which he was then acquainted been correct. Panizzi was amazed at the question, and turning round to his friend, exclaimed, “Goodness, he knows all about it, I had never noticed the difference.” It is, however, a pleasure to reflect that no very serious results accrued from these disputes between the antagonists, and this is to be attributed to the circumstance that both were true gentlemen, in the strict sense of the word, and both men of education.
Whatever differences they may have had, they controlled their feelings, and reined in their animosities, guided by the polished hand of education, which, as was instilled into our minds, in our schoolboy days,
“Emollit mores nee sinit esse feros.”
The whole case affords a fair example of the influence of gentle blood and good breeding, as opposed to that grossness of ignorance, the sure tendency of which is to cause forgetfulness of our better nature, delivering us bound into the power of unbridled passion, and forcing the most trivial disagreements to issue in petty spite and ill-feeling. Conduct unworthy of a gentleman was the last thing that would be found on either side in the case of Panizzi v. Ellis.
It is devoutly to be wished that this would happen on every occasion where two men opposed in views meet; but it has been our lot to see a very different state of affairs, where the disputants were unequally matched on the intrinsic points of education and breeding.