Manuscript Room

In the bewildering maze of the British museum, where many miles ef shelves and cases are füled with world's treasures, there is one little room that attracts a greater number of visitors than any other, says Lippincott's. Tbe crowds that throng about the cases in this room are composed of persons of curiously diverse characteristics. It is a center of interest for scholar and üterary people, and yet seems as attractive to the least learned of the visitors. This is the room which contains the department of autographs and manuscrlpts, and the treasures within it are perhaps the most humanly interesting in the whole museum. Here are all manner of writings by the hands of the world's great men' of many ages and countries. There are personal letters of kings and popes, queens, ministers and courtiers, whose names in history, in story and in song seem not to stand for real men and women, but rather for legendary beings; and these letters reveal in some homely . phrase ot bit of simple sentiment a touch of human nature ■which seems to make ihem more akin to those who curiously scan the documents to-day. Here one may come, as it seems, to actual ac.luaintance with the most notable of -he characters in Shakespeare's historica! dramas, and get a new reading, in j the quaint original, of passages in his works. Here are charters and state papers that teil volumes of history in ! a few linea letters of the great I ious reformers, of statesmen, generáis, j poets and composers. These autograph documents, many of them letters from husband to wife or lover to sweetheart, show famous personages in a very different light from that in which they are eommonly seen in the pages of i tory.