To the conspicuous merits which belong to Sir Robert COTTON as a politician of no mean acumen, and as,—in the event,—the real Founder of the British Museum, are added the still higher distinctions of an eminently generous spirit and a faithful heart. His openhandedness in giving was constant and princely. His firmness in friendship is testified by the fact that although (in a certain point of view) he was the courtier both of JAMES THE FIRST and of CHARLES THE FIRST, he nevertheless stood persistently and unflinchingly by the side of ELIOT, and of the men who worked with ELIOT, in the period of their deepest court disgrace. By the best of the Parliamentarian leaders he was both reverenced and loved. And he reciprocated their feeling. [Sidenote: RECENT ATTACKS ON SIR ROBERT COTTON’S MEMORY.] My personal pleasure in the task of writing the life of such a man as he was is much enhanced by a strong conviction that certain recent attacks upon his memory are based upon fallacious evidence, shallow presumptions, and hasty judgments. It is my hope to be able to shew to the Reader, conclusively, that COTTON was worthy of the cordial regard and the high esteem in which he was uniformly held by men who stood free of all bias from political and party connexion—such, for example, as William CAMDEN, who spoke of him, almost with dying lips, as ‘the dearest of all my friends,’—as well as by those great Parliamentarian leaders whose estimate of him may, perhaps, be thought—by hasty readers—to rest partly, if not mainly, on the eminent political service which he was able to render them. When these pages shall come from the Press just three hundred years will have elapsed since Sir Robert COTTON’s birth. Our English proto-collector was born in the year 1570. The year 1870 will, in all probability, witness the definite solution of a knotty problem as to the future of the great institution of which he was the primary and central founder. COTTON may be regarded as the English ‘proto-collector,’ in a point of view other than that which concerns the British Museum. No Library in the United Kingdom can, I think, shew an _integral_ ‘Collection,’ still extant, the formation of which—as a Collection—can be traced to an earlier date than that of the collection of the Cottonian Manuscripts. Whether the BRITISH MUSEUM shall continue to be the great national repository for Science, as well as for Literature and Antiquities, is a question which is fast ripening for decision; and it is one which ought to be interesting to all Britons. It is also, and very eminently, one of those questions of which it is literally—and not sarcastically—to be affirmed that ‘there is much to be said on both sides.’