Edward Edwards

“ At half past six that stillness was punctuated by a single shell, which broke barely in our rear. And then the ball commenced—the most intense bombardment we had yet experienced. Most of the fire came from the batteries in concealed positions on our right, whence, as on the fourth, they poured in a very destructive enfilade fire which swept up and down the length of the trench like the stream of a hose, making it a shambles. Each burst of high-explosive shells, each terrible pulsation of the atmosphere, if it missed the body, seemed to rend the very brain, or else stupefied it. ”

“ When it happens that the spirit of the Earl meets his rank and his duties, we have the best examples.... These are the men who make England that strong-box and Museum it is; who gather and protect works of art, dragged from amidst burning cities and revolutionary countries, and brought hither, out of all the world.... When I saw that, besides deer and pheasants, these men have preserved Arundel Marbles, Townley Galleries, Howard and Spencer Libraries, Warwick and Portland Vases, Saxon Manuscripts, Monastic Architectures, and Millenial Trees, I pardoned their high park-fences.’ ”

“ It was the ambition of this young Etonian—not to eclipse jockies, or to dazzle the eyes of fools, but—to tread in the footsteps of Linnæus. Rich, hardy, and handsome in person, sanguine in temperament, and full of talent, he resolved that, for some years to come, after leaving the University, the life that might so easily be brimmed with enjoyments should incur many privations and face many hardships, in order to win both knowledge and the power of benefiting the Public by its communication. ”

“ Simmons and I struggled for the gun which he tried so hard to turn on us, the dog meanwhile sinking its teeth deep in our unprotected legs and leaping vainly at our throats; while we felt with clutching fingers for his master's, intent only that he should not shout.
In those mad moments there sped through our brains the reel of that whole horrid film of fifteen [185] months' torture of mind and body; the pale, blood-covered faces of our murdered comrades of the regiment, the cries of the patient Russians behind the trees, and our own slow and deadly starvation and planned mistreatment. ”

“ I replied: "Germany's full of houses and people. That's no news. Come on."
"Oh! They'll see us sure, Edwards—and telegraph ahead all over the country. We haven't got any more show than a rabbit."
With that I lost patience and gave him a piece of my mind. We stood there, arguing it back and forth.
It was no use: He fell prey to his own fears; saw certain capture and a dreadful punishment. He conjured up all the dangers that an active imagination could envisage: Every bush was a German and every sound the occasion of a fresh alarm. ”

“ English readers now know quite enough about Gondomar to judge whether or not his sole testimony is sufficient to damn the fame of such a man as Cotton;—to degrade him from the rank of an English worthy;—to brand him as a criminal virtually convicted of apostacy in religion, and of treason to his avowed convictions in politics? ”

“ When watching—in the bygone years—the late Henry Corbould busy at the work into which he threw so much of his love, as well as of his skill in drawing, I have been tempted, now and then, to envy the craft which, in its results, made our national possessions familiarly known, in the far parts of the world, to students who could never hope to see the wonderful handicraft of the old Greek sculptors, otherwise than as it is reflected and transmitted by the handicraft of the skilled modern draughtsman. ”

“ As far, indeed, as regards a public and national care for matters of the intellect, France is far better entitled to claim a priority in the proud distinction of ‘teaching the nations how to live,’ than is any other country in the world. It is to her immortal honour that from a very early period, and even in times of sore trouble, her sovereigns and her statesmen have known how to turn public resources to the promotion of public culture, as well as of national power. ”

“ There is perhaps no apparent reason, on the surface, why a great Nation should not be able to enlarge the most varied public collections as effectively, and as impartially, within one building, as within half a dozen buildings. Nor does there seem to be any necessary connection between the wise and liberal government of public collections, and their severance or division into many buildings, rather than their combination within a single structure. ”

“ There were here at Vehnmoor, as there had been at Giessen, a certain few of our own men who traded on the misfortunes of their own comrades. This man was the worst of them all. He was a sergeant-major in a certain famous regiment of the line in the British Army. He was a fair sample of that worst type which the army system so often delegates authority to—and complains because that authority does not meet with the respect it should on the part of its victims.
He excelled in all the arts of the sycophant: The pleasure of the guards was his delight, their displeasure, his poignant grief. ”

“ In April, 1609, the death of John, Lord Lumley, without issue, enabled the Prince to gratify his love of books by purchasing a Library which probably was more valuable than any other collection then existing in England, with the exception of that of Sir Robert Cotton.
Thirty years before, Lord Lumley had inherited the fine library of his father-in-law, Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, who had been a collector of choice manuscripts at a time when the reckless dispersion of monastic treasures impoverished the nation, but gave, here and there, golden opportunities to openhanded private men. ”

“ I cannot convey the black despair which took possession of our hearts at the seeming hopelessness of all our efforts to find firm footing or a break in the landscape which might indicate a change in the nature of the country, a light, a voice, anything that would help to lift from our hearts the feeling of utter isolation from all human assistance and the seeming certainty that a few bubbles would be the only indication that we had struggled there. ”

“ An extensive correspondence with the Continent became to him both a pursuit and an enjoyment, and one of its results, in course of time, was that at his house in Soho Square every eminent foreigner who came to England was sure to be seen. To another class of persons that house became scarcely less distinguished as the abode, not only of the rich Collections in natural history which their owner had gone so far to seek, and had gathered with so much toil and hardship, but of a noble Library, for the increase of which the book-shops of every great town in Europe had been explored. ”

“ From a very early age, Henry showed that in him were combined in happy proportions a strong relish for the pleasures of literature with a relish not less keen for the pursuits and employments of an active and out-of-doors life. He could enjoy books thoroughly, without being absorbed by them. He had a manly delight in field sports, without falling under the temptation to become a slave to his pastime. ”

“ In addition, kind Nature draws a veil for him over so much of all the worst of it that many details are spared his later recollection. He remembers only the indescribable confusion and the bursting claps of near-by flame, as foul in color and as ill of smell as an addled egg. He knows only that the acid of the high-explosive gas eats into the tissue of his brain and lungs, destroying with other things, most memories of the shelling. ”

“ The bequests of Francis Egerton had, among their many useful results, the enabling of Thomas Chalmers to add one more to his fruitful labours for the Christian Church and for the world.
It may not, I trust, be out of place to notice in this connection, and as one among innumerable debts which our country owes specifically to its Church Establishment, the impressive and varied way in which the English Church has, at every period, inculcated the lesson (by no means, nowadays, a favourite lesson of ‘the age’) that men owe duties to posterity, as well as duties to their contemporaries. ”

“ If, besides the attraction of mere novelty, there should chance to have been a keen burst of search over a difficult country, before the eager searcher could succeed in running down his quarry, he would be more than human if, in the moment of victory, he could weigh and balance with exact precision the real value of the hard-won spoil. ”

“ Within a period of less than thirty years, vast and widely-distant cities, rich in works of art, have been literally disinterred. In succession to the superb marbles of Athens, of Phigaleia, and of Rome, some of the choicest sculptures and most curious minor antiquities of Nineveh, of Calah, of Erech, of Ur-of-the-Chaldees, of Babylon, of Xanthus, of Halicarnassus, of Cnidus, and of Carthage, have come to London. ”

“ Already the Prussians were crowding round us threateningly again, with their saw-edged bayonets ready, some fixed in the rifle, others clasped short, like daggers, for such a butchering as they had had earlier in the afternoon, when I had been so nearly axed.
"Might as well kill us outright as scare us to death," complained Scarfe bitterly.
Nevertheless our hearts leaped when a moment later our mysterious black officer friend hove in sight. Life is sweet. ”

“ Edward, Earl of Oxford, had stood at one period of his life, in the rank of the wealthiest of Englishmen. He was the owner of estates worth some four or five hundred thousand pounds. He was, too, a man of highly intellectual and studious tastes; but, in his case, a magnificent style of living, great generosity, and excessive trust in dependants, did what is more usually the work of huge folly or of gross sins; they brought him into circumstances which, for his position in life, might almost be called those of poverty. ”

“ He has seen, also, that the praise of so striking a change was due, in the main, to the public spirit and the liberal endeavours of a small group of antiquarians and scholars. They were, most of them, men of high birth, and of generous education. They were, in fact, precisely such men as, in the jargon of our present day, it is too much the mode to speak of as the antitheses of ‘the People,’ although in earlier days men of that strain were thought to be part of the very core and kernel of a nation. ”

“ In the chief countries of the Continent of Europe—on the other hand—great national Museums have, commonly, had their origin in the liberality and wise foresight either of some sovereign or other, or of some powerful minister whose mind was large enough to combine with the cares of State a care for Learning. In Britain, our chief public collection of literature and of science originated simply in the public spirit of private persons. ”

“ Hence it is that, in addition to the matchless roll of English worthies which, in her best days, the Church has furnished—in that long line of men, from her ranks, who have done honour to her, and to England, under every point of view—she can show a subsidiary list, comprising men whose benefactions are more influential than were, or could have been, the labours of their lives; men of the sort who, being dead, can yet speak, and to much better purpose than ever they could speak when alive. ”

“ The gift embraced several Biblical Manuscripts of value, and a still choicer series of early printed books, one hundred and eighty in number. The giver has a merited place in the roll of our public benefactors; and his devout prayer for the new Museum, ‘May it increase and multiply ... to the benefit of the people of these nations and of the whole earth,’ has had a more conspicuous fulfilment than could, in 1759, have been imagined by the most sanguine of bystanders. ”

“ When to this remark the Doctor added the words: ‘Those old prints are such as cannot be made by any artist now living,’ he asserted what was undoubtedly true, if he limited that high praise to the best class of the works of which he was speaking. But his words carry in them also an indirect testimony of honour to George the Third. If, in the century which has passed since Samuel Johnson discussed with Frederick Barnard the wisest means of forming a Royal Library, a great stride has been made by the arts of design in Britain, a share of the merit belongs to the patriotic old King. ”

“ With some of this man’s contemporaries it was quite otherwise. Some English statesmen whose names we have all learnt to venerate, looked upon the murder of Overbury as a revengeful deed instigated by Lady Somerset, wholly without her husband’s complicity; and they looked at Somerset’s conviction of complicity in the crime as simply the issue of a skilfully-managed court intrigue, for a court object. They knew that Somerset’s enemies had been wont to say amongst themselves, ‘A nail is best driven out by driving in another nail,’ and had, very effectually, put the proverb into action. ”

“ The ‘body of geography’ contained in the Georgian Library has never, I think, been surpassed in any one Collection (made by a single Collector) in the world. It laid, substantially, the foundation of the noble assemblage of charts and maps which now forms a separate Department of the Museum, under the able superintendence of Mr. Richard Henry Major, who has done much for the advancement of geographical knowledge in many paths, but in none more efficiently than in his Museum labours. ”

“ Cotton may be regarded as the English ‘proto-collector,’ in a point of view other than that which concerns the British Museum. No Library in the United Kingdom can, I think, shew an integral ‘Collection,’ still extant, the formation of which—as a Collection—can be traced to an earlier date than that of the collection of the Cottonian Manuscripts.
Whether the British Museum shall continue to be the great national repository for Science, as well as for Literature and Antiquities, is a question which is fast ripening for decision; and it is one which ought to be interesting to all Britons. ”

“ Men of every race under Heaven must have worked hard to furnish it. It brings together the plants of Australia; the minerals of Peru; the shells of the far Pacific; the manuscripts which had been painfully compiled or transcribed by twenty generations of labourers in every corner of Europe, as well as in the monasteries of Africa and of the Eastern Desert; and the sculptures and the printed books of every civilised country in the world. ”

“ The difficulties at Constantinople proved to be almost trivial in comparison with those which ensued at Athens. Every step was met, both by the official persons and the people generally, with jealousy and obstruction. If a scaffold was put up, the Turks were sure that it was with a view to look into the harem of some neighbouring house. If a fragment of sculpture was examined with any visible delight or eagerness, they were equally sure that it must contain hidden gold. ”

“ Most of the objects which it contains have no affinity with those which are contained in the other parts of the Museum, nor is the collection worthy of this country for its extent, nor yet, owing to its exceptional character, is it brought together in a methodical and instructive manner. Occupying but a secondary place in the British Museum, it cannot obtain either the space or the attention which it might obtain, were it not surrounded and cast into the shade by a vast number of splendid and interesting objects which have irresistible claims to preference. ”

“ When the Memorial of Sloane’s Trustees was first presented to George the Second, he received it with the stolid indifference to all matters bearing upon science and mental culture, which was as saliently characteristic of that king as were his grosser vices. ‘I don’t think there are twenty thousand pounds in the Treasury,’ was the remark with which he dismissed the proposal. Money could be found, indeed, for very foolish purposes, and for very base ones. And the bareness of the Treasury was, very often, the natural result of the profligacy of the Court. ”

“ If there may really, by some dim possibility, have been here and there an inglorious Hampden, or a mute Shakespeare, it is very certain that there have been, in literary history and in like departments of human study, many an unknown Disraeli, many a Tom Warton, brimful of knowledge about poets and poetry, who never could have lived long enough to put to public use the materials he had laboriously brought together. ”