The late William CURETON had entered the service of the Trustees of the British Museum in 1837, at the age of twenty-nine, when he had been already for about eight years in holy orders. He was a native of Westbury, in Shropshire. His education, begun at Newport School, had been matured at Christ Church, Oxford. He had been just about to enter himself at Christ Church in the ordinary way, when his father died, suddenly, leaving the family fortunes under considerable embarrassment. CURETON, and a brother of his, showed the metal they were both made of, by instantly changing their youthful plans. That the whole of the diminished patrimony might be at their mother’s sole disposal, William CURETON went to Oxford as a servitor. His brother, instead of waiting for his expected commission in the Army, enlisted as a private dragoon. And certainly, in the issue, neither of these young men lost any ‘dignity’—in any sense of that word—on account of the step so unselfishly taken at their start in life. William CURETON began his literary labours as a Coadjutor-Under-Librarian in old Bodley. Dr. GAISFORD introduced him to Dr. BANDINEL, in 1834, with the words:—‘I bring you a good son. He will make a good librarian.’ It was at Oxford that he laid the substantial foundation of his Oriental studies. After three years, he followed the fashion already set him by some of the best and ablest officers the Bodleian has ever had—ELLIS, BABER, and H. O. COXE, for example—by transferring, for a time, his services from the great Library of Oxford to that of London. [Sidenote: CURETON’S ENTRANCE INTO THE BRITISH MUSEUM.] His first (or nearly his first) Museum task was to set to work on the cataloguing of the Arabic and Persian MSS. In 1842, he began his earliest Oriental publication (undertaken for the ‘Oriental Text Society,’ to be mentioned presently), namely, AL SHARASTANI’S ‘_Book of Religious and of Philosophical Sects_.’