Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.”
“Now then, ’ere you are, look sharp!” shouts our familiar urchin, utterly ignoring our poetic mutterings. Straight away he plunges into the chaos like an arrow shot from a bow. We follow blindly, breathlessly, with the grace of a polar bear after a gadfly, and in an incredibly short space of time reach the safety of the Museum doorway.
What a transformation scene greets our eyes when we enter! Here is a little Paradise indeed: food, warmth, light, and all the treasures of the Universe besides. Without—we know—are horrors worse than Bluebeard’s dungeons or the Underground Railway at Gower Street. But what matter to us now if the sky rains salt herrings and the streets be full of roaring bulls, for we are safe from the great Babel, although we can see its stir if we will.
Come! sober scholar, gay flaneur, or ignoramus (it is all the same), rest, and drink in the fascinations of these armies of priceless china, silver, glass, pictures, and furniture which shine, and glint, and sparkle, and peep, in tantalising invitation! Here are rare editions: historic relics: miniatures, lace, statuary—in short, a banquet to suit all tastes; and here, more particularly, in the least prominent position, is a unique collection of musical instruments, hiding their heads in remoteness. It is regrettable that many of these interesting relics of the past are placed in such dark corners that a good deal of nose-flattening and eye-straining is necessary to see them at all. Still, one is well rewarded for any slight personal inconvenience sustained in viewing them, for, apart from their special interest, do they not stand before us as the mute historians of the past?
Look at this old virginal, encased in what was once rich red velvet, but now faded and worn with the touch of many a vanished hand! Behold those keys, brown with age! Yet these were once white and responsive to the taper fingers of that most consummate diplomatist, Queen Bess. Surely it was just here, on this side, that my Lord of Leicester stood bending his proud head to eagerly plead an answer to his oft-repeated suit! Or perhaps it was impulsive Essex plucked and twitched the thing, while he sued for the pardon of an elderly, capricious coquette!
A little to the left of the historic virginal is the harp of the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, brave owner of that empty title, Reine de France. What has been the history of the graceful thing since that short space of calm when its tones resounded in the Queen’s Salon at the Tuileries? Was it also dragged after the poor lady by a cruel infuriated mob, like the harp of her friend, Mademoiselle de Lamballe? Who knows! The tumbrels seem to rumble by us as we gaze, and the sickening refrain:
“Madame Veto avait promis