“I have submitted a plan of building in the Quadrangle to the Trustees, which has taken with them all amazingly, and will, no doubt, be executed, for even the architect is pleased with it. He will have nothing on earth to do but carry into execution my ideas; he has not been able to suggest one single improvement. He tried yesterday to draw a plan somewhat different from mine, but he was obliged to admit it was a failure, and will have to execute purely and simply my own plan. I shall save the country many and many thousand pounds, and do wonders for readers and library.” And in December of the same year, he addressed a letter to Hallam, the answer to which we give:— “December 2, 1852. “My dear Sir, I have just received your valuable letter on the proposed application to the Treasury for an addition to the building at the Museum. Your plan appears to me the only one which will meet the emergency, and also the only one which, on the score of expense, the Government are at all likely to entertain. But as the Trustees have already laid both this and the proposed building to the east before the Treasury, they cannot avoid giving them the choice. I much fear that it will not be possible for me to attend with the rest of the deputation—that is, I am engaged at a distance from London both next and the following week. I will do, however, all I can to be present. But I do not suppose the Treasury will have time before the adjournment of Parliament. You have, I dare say, called on the Trustees forming the deputation. I will, however, and as you permit me, transmit your letter to Mr. Macaulay. I think that Mr. Goulburn is as likely to have weight as any one, but I am sure you have been in communication with him. I should not be surprised at the removal of Elgin and other marbles to the new National Gallery, but, of course, that part of the Museum could not be converted into a library without much inconvenience and expense. Yours, &c., &c., H. HALLAM.” In June, 1852, there appeared in the _Quarterly Review_, an interesting article on the British Museum, from the pen of no less a personage than the Right Honourable Wilson Croker himself. On the face of this article the writer shows himself a thorough advocate of the merits of the Reading-Room then in existence. Denying the credibility, save in the case of a few individuals of abnormally weak and susceptible brains, of the traditional _Museum headache_, to which so many, and amongst them Thomas Carlyle, had from personal experience, borne witness; he proceeds to charge the room with the very defects on which the majority of its frequenters were in the constant habit of dilating.