One of Mr. PANIZZI’S earliest employments in his new office of 1837 was to make arrangements for the formidable task of transferring the whole mass of the old Library from Montagu House to the new Building, but he also did something immediately towards preparing the way for that systematic enlargement of the Collection of Printed Books which he had formerly and so earnestly pressed on the attention, not merely of the Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1835–36, but of every Statesman and Parliament-man whose ear he could gain, whether (in his interlocutor’s opinion) in season or out of season. To use the expression of the man who, at a later date, mainly helped him in that task, Mr. PANIZZI’S leading thought, in regard to Public Libraries, was that Paris must be surpassed. In common with others of us who, like himself, had been examined before Mr. HAWES’ Committee on that subject, he had brought into salient relief some points of superiority which foreign countries possessed over Britain, but the ruling motive of the unsavoury comparison was British improvement, not, most assuredly, British discredit. In the formidable business of the transfer of the bulk of the National Library, Mr. PANIZZI received his best help from a man now just lost to us, but whose memory will surely survive. Exactly six months after his own appointment to the headship of his Department, he introduced into the permanent service of the Trustees Mr. Thomas WATTS. [Sidenote: THE LITERARY CAREER AND THE PUBLIC SERVICES OF THOMAS WATTS.] The readers of such a volume as this will not, I imagine, think it to be a digression if I here make some humble attempt to record what was achieved by my old acquaintance—an acquaintance of almost one and thirty years’ standing—both in his varied literary labours and in his long and fruitful service at the Museum. Thomas WATTS was born in London in the year 1811. He was educated at a private school in London, where he was very early noted for the possession of three several qualities, one or other of which is found, in a marked degree, in thousands of men and in tens of thousands of precocious boys, but the union of all of which, whether in child or in man, is rare indeed. Young WATTS evinced both an astonishing capacity for acquiring languages—the most far remote from his native speech—and an unusual readiness at English composition. He had also a knack for turning off very neat little speeches and recitations. Before he was fifteen, he could give good entertainment at a breaking up or a ‘speech-day.’ Before he was twenty, he had gained his footing as a contributor to periodical literature.[29]