The Secretary was, as has already been remarked, the Rev. Josiah Forshall, and the government of the Museum was in his hands. By a most preposterous regulation, while the inferior officer, the Secretary, always attended the meetings of the Trustees, the Principal Librarian was never present unless summoned. Mr. Forshall enjoyed the fullest confidence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in whose hands, by a tacit understanding which had become traditional, almost all administrative arrangements were left by the Principal Trustees. He was entirely opposed to all innovation tending to impart a more popular character to the Institution; and was, in fine, as thoroughly the representative of the principles on which the Museum had hitherto been administered as Panizzi was of those destined to supersede them.
Mr. Millard, the trivial cause of the Committee’s great effect, did not occupy much of its attention. It appeared that he had been removed for two causes, either of which was in itself sufficient to justify the act: he was incompetent, and his services had been dispensed with. The inferior work on which he had been engaged was discontinued; he was fit for nothing else. He had been treated with great and, indeed, with immoderate indulgence, having been allowed to remain two years after his virtual dismissal, in order “to give him an opportunity of finding another situation.” His case, it appeared, had kept the amiable Principal Librarian awake all night; the Keeper of MSS. himself, strangely enough, had given him a testimonial to the Windham Club. His patron endeavoured to prove his efficiency; but on July 2nd Sir Frederick Madden, then Assistant-Keeper of the MSS. came down “_with some instances of Mr. Millard’s mistakes, and some questions which I should like to put him_.” For some sufficient reason the instances were not adduced, the questions were not put, and no more was heard of Mr. Millard. He had, however, made an outlet for the long accumulating dissatisfaction with the Museum management, and the Committee found themselves arbiters in contentions affecting every Department in the Institution. They had to digest Mr. Forshall’s opinion that “_men professionally engaged in literary and scientific pursuits_” were unfit for the office of Trustee; and to reconcile Sir Henry Ellis’s statement that literary and scientific men looked up to a Trusteeship as the blue ribbon of their calling, with his admission that not one of them had ever obtained it. They had to enquire whether Sir Henry had made an adequate examination of the Baron de Joursanvault’s manuscripts, magnanimously offered by that nobleman to the English nation for 100,000 francs and permission to import 500 pipes of Beaune wine duty free. If he had not done so, was it because the collection was shelved so high that Sir Henry could not get at it without a ladder, and was it really a fact that no ladder could be found in the whole town of Pomard? Was it true, as asserted by the _Edinburgh Review_, that cases of birds had been transferred to the College of Surgeons and subsequently repurchased by the Museum? Or was Sir Henry Ellis’s conjecture admissible that certain green glass bottles, of which the transfer was acknowledged, might have been large enough and dirty enough to have been mistaken by the person who wrote that review “for packing cases?” How much of the Saurian collection bought from Mr. T. Hawkins was plaster? Was the Keeper of Geology justified in affirming that “the principal ichthyosaurus could not be exhibited without derogation from the character of the British Museum,” and that if it were treated as it deserved “_the whole tail would disappear_?”