To the proposal of a lottery there was much solid objection. What were then called ‘parliamentary lotteries’ had been introduced expressly to put down those private lotteries, common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had been fraught with mischief. It was hoped, or pretended, that a ‘regulated’ evil would be reduced within tolerable limits, whilst bringing grist to the national mill. But the forty years that had passed since the first parliamentary lottery of 1709 had shown that the system was essentially and incurably mischievous. PELHAM was averse to its continuance. As First Lord of the Treasury, it was his poverty, not his will, that consented to the adoption of so questionable an expedient for the purchase of the SLOANE Collections. He had not, individually, any such love of learning as might have induced an appeal to Parliament to set, for once, an example of liberal and far-sighted legislation. He merely stipulated that some stringent provisos should be put into the Act, directed against the nefarious practices of the lottery-jobbers. [Sidenote: THE LOTTERY OF 1753 FOR THE PURCHASE OF THE SLOANE AND HARLEIAN COLLECTIONS.] Eventually, it was enacted that there should be a hundred thousand shares, at three pounds a share; that two hundred thousand pounds should be allotted as prizes, and that the remaining hundred thousand—less the expenses of the lottery itself—should be applied to the threefold purposes of the Act, namely, the purchase of the SLOANE and HARLEIAN Collections; the providing of a Repository; and the creation of an annual income for future maintenance. By the precautionary clauses of the Bill, provision was made for the prolonged sale of shares; for the prevention of the purchase by any one adventurer of more than twenty shares, or ‘tickets,’ and for other impediments, as it was thought, to a fraudulent traffic in the combined covetousness and ignorance of the unwary. All these precautions proved to be vain. Mr. PELHAM’S opposition was abundantly justified by the result. Fraud proved to be, in that age, just as inseparable an element in a Lottery scheme, however good its purpose, as fraud has proved to be, in this age, an inseparable element (at one stage or other of the business) in a Railway scheme,—however useful the line proposed to be made. It thus came to pass that the foundation of the BRITISH MUSEUM gave rise to a great public scandal. When evidence was produced that many families had been brought to misery, as the first incident in the annals of a beneficent and noble foundation, a somewhat dull Session of Parliament was suddenly enlivened by an animated and angry debate. [Sidenote: THE PROSECUTION OF LEHEUP FOR HIS DEALINGS WITH THE MUSEUM LOTTERY.]