That the British Museum is gradually absorbing all the houses near it, and enlarging its boundaries into a large square, is evident. The whole eastern side of Bedford Square, and part of the western side of Russell Square, will soon be amalgamated into the vast building. The little lions, those ornaments on the old outer railings, about whose disappearance such an outcry was raised some years back, have been adapted to the internal use of the Museum, and higher, stronger, more important railings substituted on the outside in their place. The large pediment of the portico, imitated--at how long an interval!--from the Greek model, is, like the statues in the squares, filled with nesting birds, and is generally also white with the pigeons' plumage. And, where this enormous building now stands, was originally Old Montague House, the "stately and ample ancient palace," adorned by Verrio and built in the "French pavilion" way, when, practically, all the rest of Bloomsbury was open country. Where the big galleries now extend were corridors adorned by fresco paintings: and where the halls now given up to statues and treasures stand, were rooms full of light, music, and dancing. But I am wandering from the present. Yet, in the early winter twilight of the British Museum galleries, it is easy for vagrant fancies, unbidden, to arise. The vast dim galleries raise, indeed, ghosts and visions of a brilliant past, and confer almost humanity on their marble tenants, gigantic figures shining through the gloom. The Greek gods of the heroic age,--the creatures "moulded in colossal calm,"--we can almost imagine the minds who inspired, the workmen who wrought, the sculptors who fashioned, the temples that contained them. The stream of life still flows around the feet of these immortal ones, who in their calm smiling seem to scorn the poor passions of humanity; in their immortality, to rise above the feeble ebb and flow of human life. As Aurora they remain ever youthful, while we poor mortals, like Tithonus, adore their eternal youth and beauty, and ourselves grow old. Here, in the dim vestibule, is just such a Grecian Urn as that which Keats apostrophized, with its lovers whose undying youth and unsatisfied longing he envied.... "Ars longa, vita brevis," indeed! We go, but they shall endure,--to see "new men, new faces, other minds"; to have, perchance, new labels written for them by future Dryasdusts; to be invested with fresh attributes by a newer school of ambitious critics. Many of them have seen cities rise and fall; they have survived ruin, siege, burial, neglect; and now at last they have come here to the same dead level of monotony: "Deemed they of this, those worshippers, When, in some mythic chain of verse Which man shall not again rehearse, The faces of thy ministers Yearned pale with bitter ecstasy?