This last-named Collection extended (if we include a partial and previous gift made in 1790) to nearly two thousand volumes, and it probably embraced much more than twice that number of separate works. For it was rich in those biographical ephemera which are so precious to the historical inquirer, and often so difficult of obtainment, when needed. Nearly at the same period (1786) a valuable Collection of classical authors, in about nine hundred volumes, was bequeathed by another worthy Trustee, Mr. Thomas TYRWHITT, distinguished both as a scholar and as the Editor of CHAUCER. But all the early gifts to the Museum, made after its parliamentary organization, were eclipsed, at the close of the century, by the bequest of the Cracherode Collections. [Sidenote: THE BEQUEST OF THE CRACHERODE COLLECTION.] That bequest comprised a very choice library of printed books; a cabinet of coins, medals, and gems; and a series of original drawings by the great masters, chosen, like the books and the coins, with exquisite taste, and, as the auctioneers say, quite regardless of expense. [Sidenote: 1799.] It also included a small but precious cabinet of minerals. The collector of these rarities was wont to speak of them with great modesty. They are, he would say, mere ‘specimen collections.’ But to amass them had been the chief pursuit of a quiet and blameless life. [Sidenote: LIFE AND CHARACTER OF MR. MORDAUNT CRACHERODE.] Clayton Mordaunt CRACHERODE was born in London about the year 1730. And he was ‘a Londoner’ in a sense and degree to which, in this railway generation, it would be hard to find a parallel. Among the rich possessions which he inherited from Colonel CRACHERODE, his father—whose fortune had been gathered, or increased, during an active career in remote parts of the world—was an estate in Hertfordshire, on which there grew a certain famous chestnut-tree, the cynosure of all the country-side for its size and antiquity. This tree was never seen by its new owner, save as he saw the poplars of Lombardy, or the cedars of Lebanon—in an etching. In the course of a long life he never reached a greater distance from the metropolis than Oxford. He never mounted a horse. The ordinary extent of his travels, during the prime years of a long life, was from Queen Square, in Westminster, to Clapham. For almost forty years it was his daily practice to walk from his house to the shop of ELMSLY, a bookseller in the Strand, and thence to the still more noted shop of Tom PAYNE, by ‘the Mews-Gate.’ Once a week, he varied the daily walk by calling on MUDGE, a chronometer-maker, to get his watch regulated. His excursions had, indeed, one other and not infrequent variety—dictated by the calls of Christian benevolence—but of these he took care to have no note taken.