Directly art was in this way officially and substantially incorporated by the State, the golden stream of private munificence with no check and in great volume flowed towards Brompton. Most readers of these lines will remember the consignment to this wealthy spot of the Dickens manuscripts and relics as well as the library and paintings bequeathed to it by the friend and biographer of Dickens, the late John Forster, in 1876. These had some years earlier been preceded by the pictures, bric-à-brac, and foreign furniture collected by various private connoisseurs, now stowed away in the glass-covered cabinets which line the galleries and which, studied daily by English artizans, have probably done more than the '51 Exhibition ever effected, towards improving the designs of English manufacture. South Kensington, it should be remembered, is richer even than it appears. Its activities are ubiquitous. It is a bank of art treasures on which institutions affiliated to it throughout the Kingdom can draw at discretion. To-day this department of State, decorative as to its purpose, but distinctly remunerative as to its results, is supported by an annual endowment of nearly half a million. That outlay not only gives profitable holidays to countless pleasure seekers from every quarter of the Kingdom; it enables a yearly average of 30,000 pupils of both sexes to pass through its art and science classes. This apparatus for developing and training the future artists of England has been accompanied with an increasingly lavish expenditure by the State when a chance has occurred of permanently adding to its artistic wealth. Thus, during the early eighties the Treasury paid for a single painting from the Blenheim collection, the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael, exactly the same sum that, thirty years earlier, had been voted for the entire collection of Sir Robert Peel.[85]