You can usually find visitors from America studying the signatures of English sovereigns from Richard the Second to George the Fifth, and the museum's extraordinary collection of manuscripts. They can see a letter from Wolsey ("poor, bevy, wrechyd prest") to Henry the Eighth, Sir Philip Sidney's handwriting on the day before his death, the Revels Accounts of 1605 with the name ai "Shaxberd," the anonymous letter that warned Monteagle of Gunpowder Plot, the signed declarations of Guido! Fawkes, Shakespeare's signature to his Bellot v. Mountjoy deposition, Wellington's Waterloo despatch—document upon document set out in the lofty hall where Torrigiani's superb monument to Dr. John Yang stands in a corner.
School parties visit the museum often; historians know it well The average Londoner passes by-—there will "always be time" to see it.
Not far away, across Lincoln's Inn, is a second of London's lesser-known museums, a tall white house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, once the home of Sir John Soane, architect. of the Bank of England. This "cabinet of curiosities,—#emaining as. he left it, is open for eight months in the year.
When a representative of "The Observer" visited it last week it was about to close until October. Only a few people were in the strange maze packed with the results of Soane's collecting career. Two, one an American, stood in a glorified cupboard with walls opening like the leaves of a book, where Hogarth's nine pictures of the "Rake's Progress" and his sardonic "Election" Scenes filled the room with vigorous life. Downstairs two others studied the great alabaster sarcophagus of Seti the First.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.