Long before SLOANE’s time (as we shall see hereafter), there had been zealous and repeated efforts to arouse the attention of the Government as well to the political importance as to the educational value of public museums. Many thinkers had already perceived that such collections were a positive increase of public wealth and of national greatness, as well as a powerful instrument of popular education. It had been shewn, over and over again, that for lack of public care precious monuments and treasures of learning had been lost; sometimes by their removal to far-off countries; sometimes by their utter destruction. Until the appeal made to Parliament by the Executors of Sir Hans SLOANE, in the middle of the eighteenth century, all those efforts had uniformly failed. [Sidenote: THE REAL FOUNDERS OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM.] But Sir Hans SLOANE cannot claim to be regarded, individually or very specially, as the Founder of the British Museum. His last Will, indeed, gave an opportunity for the foundation. Strictly speaking, he was not even the Founder of his own Collection, as it stood in his lifetime. The Founder of the Sloane Museum was William COURTEN, the last of a line of wealthy Flemish refugees, whose history, in their adopted country, is a series of romantic adventures. [Sidenote: THE ACQUISITION, BY THE NATION, OF THE COTTON LIBRARY.] Parliament had previously accepted the gift of the Cottonian Library, at the hands of Sir John COTTON, third in descent from its Founder, and its acceptance of that gift had been followed by almost unbroken neglect, although the gift was a noble one. [Sidenote: (T. Carte to Sir Thomas Hanmer, Speaker of the House of Commons; _Hanmer Corresp._, p. 226.)] Sir John, when conversing, on one occasion, with Thomas CARTE, told the historian that he had been offered £60,000 of English money, together with a _carte blanche_ for some honorary mark of royal favour, on the part of LEWIS THE FOURTEENTH, for the Library which he afterwards settled upon the British nation. It has been estimated that SLOANE expended (from first to last) upon his various collections about £50,000; so that, even from the mercantile point of view, the COTTON family may be said to have been larger voluntary contributors towards our eventual National Museum than was Sir Hans SLOANE himself. That point of view, however, would be a very false, because very narrow, one.