The proper way to make friends with a museum, as with people, is to get to know it slowly, or its very excellences will give you a surfeited memory. I once avoided the beautiful old Cluny Museum in Paris for many years, because I had been oppressed by the fact that it contained 11,000 objects of interest. No one had shown me how to ignore their number and get to love the very walls of Cardinal Jacques d’Amboise’s stately house, by never crossing the sunny courtyard to see more than one sort of exhibit at a time. I think this plan is even more applicable to the British Museum, that great collection, partly bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane and opened to the public in 1759. There are two things the hurried visitor can do so as to carry away the possession of a definite memory of one phase of the treasures contained in the vast building in Great Russell Street. He may choose to go there at the hours of 12 or 3 P.M. and follow one of the two expert lecturers who conduct people each day to see a different group of exhibits and listen to their story. (Lists of these lectures are given at the door.) Or he may choose for himself the sort of thing he finds most interesting and sternly traverse the other rooms intent only on the objects of his choice. In either case he is luckier than the visitors in the early days of the museum’s existence, who were herded in companies of only fifteen for a two hours’ visit. To-day one is diffident about directing any choice; as the old guardian said, “Most people ’as their fancies!” They may lie in the direction of the mummy rooms, where the prehistoric man, so startlingly like a modern, crouches in his grave, with his stone flints within reach, or in the room of gold ornaments and gems, where lie the necklaces that rose and fell on breasts dead these thousand years, necklaces that differ nowise from the amethyst and jade trinkets to be seen in Bond Street to-day. Or you may like best to stroll in that pleasant place the King’s Library--a long, gracious apartment where the sunlight gilds the warm brown of the lovely tooled bindings of George III.’s books. Into this spacious room come all sorts of people--small boys in knickerbockers anxious to consult the postage stamp collections, artists to pore over delicately illuminated pages of fifteenth-century manuscripts, students to worship at the shrine of first editions of Shakespeare and Spenser, and people who are touched with the human interest of poignant letters like that of Mary Queen of Scots to “ma bonne sœur et cousine Elizabeth.”