The real founders of our British Museum have been neither our British monarchs nor our British legislators, as such. They have been, commonly, individual and private British subjects; men loyal both to the Crown and to the People. Often, they have been men standing in direct lineal descent from the great Barons who dictated the Charter of our liberties, in the meadow near Windsor, and from those who led English knights and English bowmen to victory, on the wooded slopes near Poitiers. Sometimes, they have been men of very lowly birth; such as could point to no ancestral names appended to _Magna Charta_, or to the famous letter written from Lincoln to Boniface the Eighth; such as may, indeed, very well have had ancestors who gave their lives, or their limbs, for England at Poitiers or at Cressy, but who certainly could point to no heraldic memorials of feats of arms done on those bloody fields of France. Not a few of them, perhaps, would have been vainly asked to tell the names of their grandfathers. One boast, however, is common to both of these groups of our public benefactors. They were men who had alike a strong sense of gratitude to those who had gone before them, and a strong sense of duty to those who were to come after them. To nearly all of the men whose lives will be told in this volume are applicable, in a special sense, some words of Julius HARE:—‘They wrought in a magnanimous spirit of rivalry with Nature, or in kindly fellowship with her.... [Sidenote: J. & A. Hare, _Guesses at Truth_, vol. ii, p. 18.] When they planted, they chose out the trees of longest life—the Oak, the Chestnut, the Yew, the Elm,—trees which it does us good to behold, while we muse on the many generations of our Forefathers, whose eyes have reposed within the same leafy bays.’ They were men whose large impulses and deep insight led them to work, less for themselves than for their successors. It is by dint of what men of that stamp did—and did, not under the leading of the Gospel according to Adam SMITH, but of a Gospel very much older than it—that upon us, whose day is now passing, Posterity, so to speak, ‘has cast her shadow before; and we are, at this moment, reposing beneath it.’ Of Public Benefactions, such as those which this volume very inadequately commemorates, it is true, with more than ordinary truth, that we owe them, mainly, to a generous conviction in the hearts of certain worthies of old days that they owed suit and service to Posterity. This may, indeed, be said of public foresight, when evidenced in material works and in provisions to smooth some of the asperities of common life and of manual toil. But it may be said, more appropriately still, of another and a higher kind of public foresight;—of that evidenced in educational institutions, and in the various appliances for raising and vivifying the common intellect; for enlarging its faculties; diffusing its enjoyments; and broadening its _public_ domain. As it has