All through the long vista of the king's library, we come to cases in
which--with their pages open beneath the glass--we see books worth their
weight in gold, either for their uniqueness or their beauty, or because
they have belonged to illustrious men, and have their autographs in them.
The copy of the English translation of Montaigne, containing the strange
scrawl of Shakespeare's autograph, is here. Bacon's name is in another
book; Queen Elizabeth's in another; and there is a little devotional
volume, with Lady Jane Grey's writing in it. She is supposed to have
taken it to the scaffold with her. Here, too, I saw a copy, which was
printed at a Venetian press at the time, of the challenge which the
Admirable Crichton caused to be posted on the church doors of Venice,
defying all the scholars of Italy to encounter him. But if I mention one
thing, I find fault with myself for not putting down fifty others just as
interesting,--and, after all, there is an official catalogue, no doubt,
of the whole.
As I do not mean to fill any more pages with the British Museum, I will
just mention the hall of Egyptian antiquities on the ground-floor of the
edifice, though I did not pass through it to-day. They consist of things
that would be very ugly and contemptible if they were not so immensely
magnified; but it is impossible not to acknowledge a certain grandeur,
resulting from the scale on which those strange old sculptors wrought.
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