Here we have the most remarkable museum in this and probably any other country. Sir John Soane, the architect who designed the Bank of England, died eighty-eight years ago, and left an instruction in his will that his house, packed with treasures, should be thrown open to the public in the condition in which he left it. The furniture has hardly been moved, the pictures hang in the same positions, and if old Sir John could come back he would enter his library and go over to his desk, hardly knowing that over three-quarters of a century have intervened since he said good-bye to the things he loved with all his heart and soul. If ever the presence of a dead man printed itself on a house, this is the house. I went there the other day and found the shutters drawn. It was after closing time, but the caretaker asked me inside and courteously took me round. It was like entering a house when a family is away. I had to pull myself together and realize that this family was eighty-eight years away. There is a certain air about a house whose contents have been arranged by someone who loves it. No museum curator could imitate it. I could, in imagination, see Sir John pottering round with one of his latest treasures, wondering where to put it. He looks in bewilderment. The rooms are so crowded! He finds a place, not the best place, but his place; and there it has remained and will remain down the ages. Another ghost. Lady Soane. Dear woman, she loved these things too, so the biographers say, but it must have given her feminine heart many a twinge to see Roman pillars, gigantic stone fragments from Greek temples, life-size statues, a cast of the Apollo Belvedere, and, at last, the biggest and finest stone coffin ever taken from an Egyptian tomb, enter her home one by one. "Oh, John," her ghost said, "how full the house is. Where are we going to live?" And John, beaming and running his hand over a smooth green bronze, replied, pointing to something new: "Isn't that perfectly lovely. I think I'll have to knock down the dining-room wall!" No woman in the history of housekeeping has ever endured such an overwhelming artistic invasion. * * * Sir John began life as the son of a bricklayer. What an encouragement to all collectors of the antique! As he got on in life he collected more precious things, spent two thousand pounds on an object the British Museum could not afford, and gradually surrounded himself with one of the choicest collections any private individual has possessed. How many things enthusiasm can accomplish in one lifetime! It is inspiring to walk through this old house and realize that everything was collected by one man while he built up his career. Pictures--notably Hogarth's "The Rake's Progress"--antique gems, bronzes, manuscripts, books, ancient glass, bas-reliefs, the first three folio editions of Shakespeare, and thousands of other things came to him as steel to a magnet. It is not a house: it is a curio shop.