When their Royal Highnesses, continues our narrator, had viewed one room, and went into another, the scene was shifted. When they returned, the same tables were covered, for a second course, with all sorts of jewels, polished and set after the modern fashion, and with gems carved and engraved. For the third course, the tables were spread with gold and silver ores, and with the most precious and remarkable ores used in the dresses of men from Siberia to the Cape of Good Hope, from Japan to Peru; and with both ancient and modern coins in gold and silver. The gallery, a hundred and ten feet in length, presented a ‘surprising prospect.’ The most beautiful corals, crystals, and figured stones; the most brilliant insects; shells, painted with as great variety as the precious stones; and birds vying with the gems; diversified with remains of the antediluvian world. Then a noble vista presented itself through several rooms filled with books; among these were many hundred volumes of dried plants; a room, full of choice and valuable manuscripts; and the rich present sent by the French King to Sir Hans of the engravings of his collections of paintings, medals, and statues, and of his Palaces, in twenty-five large atlas volumes. Below stairs, some rooms were then shown, filled with the antiquities of Egypt, Greece, Etruria, Rome, Britain, and even America; other rooms and the Great Saloon were filled with preserved animals. The halls were decorated with the horns of divers creatures. [Sidenote: G. M., vol. xviii, pp. 301, 302. (July, 1748.)] ‘Fifty volumes in folio,’ concludes the enthusiastic bystander who chronicled, for Mr. Sylvanus URBAN, the royal visit of 1748, ‘would scarce suffice to contain a detail of this immense Museum, consisting of above 200,000 articles.’ The Prince of WALES, on taking leave of his host, gave expression to a wish which he did not live long enough to see realised. ‘It is a great pleasure to me,’ he said, ‘to see so magnificent a collection in England. It is an ornament to the Nation. Great honour would redound from the establishing of it for public use, to the latest posterity.’ Plans, more or less definite, of perpetuating those collections for public use had occasionally engaged their owner’s thoughts almost from the date of his acquisition of the Museum of William COURTEN, in 1702. [Sidenote: THE WILL AND CODICILS OF 1749–51.] In 1707, he had watched with interest a scheme that had been set on foot for the formation of a Public Library in London by combining the old Royal Collection with the collections of Sir Robert COTTON and of the Royal Society.[51] But that scheme failed of execution, until, almost half a century later, it was, in the main, revived and carried out as the indirect but very natural consequence of his own testamentary dispositions. His Will, in its first form, was made at Chelsea in 1748, but was replaced on the 10th July, 1749, by the following codicil:—