ure for cleaning and refitting magnanimous; but
a certain proportion of this current cost should be covered by small
entrance fees, exacted, not for any miserly helping out of the
floor-sweepers' salaries, but for the sake of the visitors themselves,
that the rooms may not be incumbered by the idle, or disgraced by the
disreputable. You must not make your Museum a refuge against either rain
or ennui, nor let into perfectly well-furnished, and even, in the true
sense, palatial, rooms, the utterly squalid and ill-bred portion of the
people. There should, indeed, be refuges for the poor from rain and
cold, and decent rooms accessible to indecent persons, if they like to
go there; but neither of these charities should be part of the function
of a Civic Museum.

196. Make the entrance fee a silver penny (a silver groat, typically
representing the father, mother, eldest son, and eldest daughter,
passing always the total number of any one family), and every person
admitted, however young, being requested to sign their name, or make
their mark.

That the entrance money should be always of silver is one of the
beginnings of education in the place--one of the conditions of its
"elegance" on the very threshold.

And the institution of silver for bronze in the lower coinage is a part
of the system of National education which I have been teaching these
last ten years--a very much deeper and wider one than any that can be
given in museums--and without which all museums will ultimately be
vain.--Ever affectionately yours,

J. R.

P.S.--There should be a well-served coffee-room attached to the
building; but this part of the establishment without any luxury in
furniture or decoration, and without any cooking apparatus for
carnivora.

_Easter Monday, 1880._

DEAR ----,

197. The day is auspicious for the beginning of reflection on the right
manner of manifestation of all divine things to those who desire to see
them. For every house of the Muses, where, indeed, they live, is an
Interpreter's by the wayside, or rather, a place of oracle and
interpretation in one. And the right function of every museum, to simple
persons, is the manifestation to them of what is lovely in the life of
Nature, and heroic in the life of Men.

There are already, you see, some quaint restrictions in that last
sentence, whereat sundry of our friends will start, and others stop. I
must stop also, myself, therefore, for a minute or two, to insi