The "Jewel Room" is another favourite haunt. Here only some twenty people are allowed in at one time, and the policemen are doubly reinforced; and indeed, since the accident to the Portland Vase, it is certainly a necessary precaution. This beautiful vase, lent in 1810 by the Duke of Portland, was smashed by a semi-lunatic in 1845. This man, suddenly and without motive, deliberately aimed a brick at it, and crashed it into fragments, from which it has been cleverly restored as we see it at present. People who find the British Museum exhausting--and they are many--take too much of it at one time. It is therefore small wonder that they often suffer from a kind of mental indigestion--"Museum headache" it has been appropriately termed. A pretty young girl complained to me of just such a headache the other day: "I wanted," she said, "to go to "Niagara," but _T--_ insisted on taking me to that dreadful Museum instead, and I had to walk past rows and rows of awful headless things for two hours!" Poor thing! But many people share her feelings without possessing her frankness. And to walk through the long, gloomy galleries of the Museum without due object, preparation, or intention, is, no doubt, exhausting. It is true that we are there "heirs of all the ages," but it is equally true that nobody can satisfactorily inherit all the ages at one and the same time. If we content ourselves with but one department for the day, it is wonderful how interested we may become. Mr. Grant Allen--who, by the way, was generally unkind about London, must have experienced the boredom that comes with a mental surfeit. "The British Museum" (he says) "is indeed a place to despair in--or else to saunter through carelessly with a glance right and left at what happens to catch your eye or take your fancy. I must add" (he continues unpleasantly), "that a certain blight of inexplicable shabbiness hangs somehow over the vast collection; whether it is the gloom of Bloomsbury, the want of space in the galleries, the haphazard mode of acquisition, or what, I know not; but certainly, for some mysterious reason, the objects here exhibited are far less interesting, relatively to their intrinsic scientific and artistic worth, than those of the Louvre, the Vatican, the Munich galleries, or any other great European museum. Dinginess and stinginess are everywhere conspicuous." Mr. Grant Allen was, evidently, a West Ender. And as he elsewhere calls St. Paul's "bare, pretentious, and unimpressive," and London generally "a squalid village," we need the less mind his calling the British Museum "a gloomy and depressed looking building." He had evidently never seen the pillared portico shining in the May sun, its flocks of pretty pigeons feeding on the green plots that line the enclosure, and the lately-planted young plane-trees bursting into vivid green,--a new "boulevard" along its outer line of railings.