It is a disgrace to the trustees that this curious museum is kept so private, and that such impediments are thrown in the way of visitors. It is open only two days a week in April, May, and June, but at certain seasons a third day is granted to foreigners, artists, and people from the country. To obtain tickets, you are obliged to get, some days before you visit, a letter from a trustee, or to write to the curator, enter your name in a book, and leave your card. All this vexatious hindrance and fuss has the desired effect of preventing many persons from visiting a museum left, not to the trustees or the curator, but to the nation--to every Englishman. In order to read the books, copy the pictures, or examine the plans and drawings, the same tedious and humiliating form must be gone through. The gem of all the Soane treasures is an enormous transparent alabaster sarcophagus, discovered by Belzoni in 1816 in a tomb in the valley of Beban el Molook, near Thebes. It is nine feet four inches long, three feet eight inches wide, two feet eight inches deep, and is covered without and within with beautifully-cut hieroglyphics. It was the greatest discovery of the runaway Paduan Monk, and was undoubtedly the cenotaph or sarcophagus of a Pharaoh or Ptolemy. It was discovered in an enormous tomb of endless chambers, which the Arabs still call “Belzoni’s tomb.” On the bottom of the case is a full-length figure in relief, of Isis, the guardian of the dead. Sir John Soane gave £2000 for this sarcophagus to Mr. Salt, Consul General of Egypt and Belzoni’s employer. The raised lid is broken into nineteen pieces. The late Sir Gardner Wilkinson considered this to be the cenotaph of Osirei, the father of Rameses the Great. But the forgotten king for whom the Soane sarcophagus was really executed was Seti, surnamed Meni-en-Ptah, the father of Rameses the Great; he is called by Manetho Séthos.[740] Dr. Lepsius dates the commencement of his reign B.C. 1439. Dr. Brugsch places it twenty years earlier. Mr. Sharpe, with that delightful uncertainty characteristic of Egyptian antiquaries, drags the epoch down two hundred years later. Seti was the father of the Pharaoh who persecuted the Israelites, and he made war against Syria. His son was the famous Rameses. All three kings were descended from the Shepherd Chiefs. The most beautiful fragment in Karnak represents this monarch, Seti, in his chariot, with a sword like a fish-slice in one hand, while in the other he clutches the topknots of a group of conquered enemies, Nubian, Syrian, and Jewish. The work is full of an almost Raphaelesque grace.