When Mr. HOSKING called public attention to his design of 1848—in a pamphlet entitled _Some Remarks upon the recent Addition of a Reading-Room to the British Museum_—Mr. Sydney SMIRKE wrote to him thus:—‘I recollect seeing your plans at a meeting of the Trustees, ... shortly after you sent them [to Lord ELLESMERE]. When, long subsequently, Mr. PANIZZI showed me his sketch for a plan of a new Reading-Room, I confess it did not remind me of yours, the purposes of the two plans and the treatment and construction were so different.’[33] [Sidenote: Sydney Smirke to William Hosking. (_Remarks_, &c.)] Whilst to Mr. SMIRKE himself belongs the merit of practical execution, that of design belongs no less unquestionably to PANIZZI. Mr. PANIZZI himself preferred, at first, the plan of extending the building on the eastern and northern sides. His suggestions had the approval of the Commissioners of 1850. [Sidenote: THE NEW OR PANIZZI READING-ROOM.] But the Government was slow to give power to the Trustees to carry out the plan of their officer and the recommendation of the Commissioners of Inquiry, by proposing the needful vote in a Committee of Supply. Plan and Report alike lay dormant from the year 1850 to 1854. It was then that, as a last resort, and as a measure of economy, by avoiding all present necessity to buy more ground of the Duke of BEDFORD, Mr. PANIZZI recommended the Trustees to build within the quadrangle, and drew a sketch-plan, on which their architect reported favourably. Sixty-one thousand pounds, by way of a first instalment, was voted on the third of July, 1854. The present noble structure was completed within three years from that day, and its total cost—including the extensive series of book-galleries and rooms of various kinds, subserving almost innumerable purposes—amounted in round numbers to a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It was thus only a little more than the cost of the King’s Library, which accommodates eighty thousand volumes of books and a Collection of Birds. The new Reading-Room and its appendages can be made to accommodate, in addition to its three hundred and more of readers, some million, or near it, of volumes, without impediment to their fullest accessibility. To describe by words a room which, in 1870, has become more or less familiar, I suppose, to hundreds of thousands of Britons, and to a good many thousands of foreigners, would now be superfluous. But it will not be without advantage, perhaps, to show its character and appearance with the simple brevity of woodcuts. The following illustrative block-plan shows the general arrangement of the Museum building at large, at the date of the erection of the new Reading-Room. [Sidenote: BLOCK-PLAN OF MUSEUM (1857), DISTINGUISHING THE LIBRARIES FROM THE GALLERIES OF ANTIQUITIES, &C.] [Illustration: I. GENERAL BLOCK-PLAN OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, AS IT WAS IN 1857. ]