CARY afterwards—and when it was too late to recall it—regretted his assent to Mr. PANIZZI’S application. He applied again to the Archbishop, and obtained something like a promise of support. He wrote several letters to the Lord Chancellor. In one of these he (unconsciously, as it seems) adduced a conclusive argument against his own appointment to the office he sought. He wrote that, as he was informed, the objections of his Lordship and of the Speaker were twofold: the one resting on his age, and the other on the state of his health. He answered the objections in these words:—‘My age, it is plain, might rather ask for me that _alleviation of labour_ which, _in this as in other public offices, is gained by promotion_ to a superior place, than call for a continuance of the same laborious employment.’ [Sidenote: Cary to the Lord Chancellor, 18 July, 1837 (_The Times_).] What must have been a Lord Chancellor’s ruminations upon the ‘alleviation of labour’ which ‘a superior place’ brings to a public servant, is a somewhat amusing subject of conjecture. It was with perfect honesty and integrity of purpose that Mr. CARY adduced medical testimony of his fitness for continued but diminished labours. He would have exerted himself to the best of his ability. But it was a blemish in an excellent man that (under momentary irritation) he twice permitted himself to reproach his competitor and colleague with being ‘a foreigner.’ One would fain have hoped that our famous countryman Daniel DEFOE had, a hundred years before, put all reproach and contumely on the score of a man’s _not_ being a ‘true-born Englishman’ quite out of Court, in all contentions concerning capabilities of public service. But, of all places in the world, a MUSEUM is the queerest place in which to raise petty questions of nationality. If it be at all worthy of its name, its contents must have come from the four quarters of the globe. Men of every race under Heaven must have worked hard to furnish it. It brings together the plants of Australia; the minerals of Peru; the shells of the far Pacific; the manuscripts which had been painfully compiled or transcribed by twenty generations of labourers in every corner of Europe, as well as in the monasteries of Africa and of the Eastern Desert; and the sculptures and the printed books of every civilised country in the world. And then it is proposed—when arrangements are to be made for turning dead collections into living fountains of knowledge—that the question asked shall be: _not_ ‘What is your capacity to administer?’ but ‘Where were you born?’ I hope, and I believe, that in later years Mr. CARY regretted that he had permitted a name so deservedly honoured to endorse so poor a sophism.