In 1782, the plan had so far improved that instead of waiting from April until August, a visitor could usually get admission within a fortnight or so after applying for a ticket. We have an intelligent and amusing account of a visit then made. This time the narrator is a German,—Charles MORITZ, of Berlin. ‘In general,’ writes MORITZ, ‘you must give in your name a fortnight before you can be admitted. But, by the kindness of Mr. WOIDE’—a countryman of the traveller, and, at that time, an Assistant-Librarian in the Museum,—‘I got admission earlier.... Yet, after all, I am sorry to say that it was the room, the glass-cases, the shelves, ... which I saw; not the Museum itself, so rapidly were we hurried on through the departments. The company who saw it when I did, and in like manner, was variously composed. They were of all sorts, and some, as I believe, of the very lowest classes of the people of both sexes, for, as it is, the property of the Nation, every one has the same ‘right’—I use the term of the country—to see it that another has. [Sidenote: WENDEBORN’S ACCOUNT OF THE MUSEUM. 1780–90.] I had Mr. WENDEBORN’S book in my pocket, and it, at least, enabled me to take more particular notice of some of the principal things.’ The book thus referred to by MORITZ is the German original of that account of English society and institutions which WENDEBORN himself translated, a few years afterwards, into English, and published at London, under the title of _A View of England_. Its author had settled in London as the Minister of a German Congregation. He was himself a studious frequenter of the Museum, and says of it: ‘The whole is costly, worth seeing, and honourable to the Nation; when taken altogether it has not its equal. When considered in its separate branches, almost each of them singly may be surpassed by some other collection even in England itself.’ But the only collection which he specifies as, in this sense, superior, are the Hunterian Museum, and that which had been formed by Sir Ashton LEVER, and which, when the _View of England_ was written, belonged to Mr. PARKINSON. [Sidenote: Wendeborn, _A View of England_, vol. i, 323–325.] Of the Museum Library, WENDEBORN says, ‘though a numerous and valuable collection, it is yet, in many respects, very deficient, and as to its use, much circumscribed.’ When the German visitor of 1782 pulled Mr. WENDEBORN’S book from his pocket, as he was hurried through the Museum, the action attracted the attention of the other visitors. The more intelligent of them pressed round him to see if the book could be made to yield any information for their behoof also. And the stranger gratified their curiosity by translating a passage or two in explanation of the objects they were passing. Then came an exquisite bit of sub-officialism.