These, however, are varieties in the human species that are ever with us. "Fear not to Sow because of the Birds," says the Koran; and the widespread sowing of culture has so far shown results, that every year the British Museum, the National Gallery, and other kindred institutions, are growing more popular and more frequented. In Art and Knowledge, as in other directions, it takes time for "the People" to appreciate fully their oldest, much less their newest, heritage. Such treasures in our vast metropolis are still too much hidden, still undiscovered by the majority. Even the educated visitor fresh from the country does not immediately realise the fact that he is free at any time to walk the marble halls of the National Gallery, to hear the fountain plashing in the Pompeian hall of the riverside palace raised by Sir Henry Tate to modern British Art, or to follow the strange instincts and laws of Nature in the beautifully arranged Natural History Museum of Kensington. The recent movement for "Sunday opening," now more or less widespread, has tended greatly to the popularisation of the national collections, and does a good deal, also, to the mitigation of the too utter gloom of the stranger's "Sunday in London." Even M. Taine, who in the "sixties" compared the metropolis of his day to "a well-ordered cemetery," or "a large manufactory of bone-black closed on account of a death," would surely have been less severely splenetic had but a museum or two been open to beguile his tedium. In our present year of grace, the British Museum, from two till four, is thronged by the lower middle-class, who, if their affection for mummies is a trifle out of proportion to the interest they take in the Elgin Marbles, and their love of historic missals is sometimes too subordinate to the intricacies of the neighbouring World's Unique Stamp-Collection, yet show in their way an intelligent and praiseworthy desire for knowledge.