Page:Library Construction, Architecture, Fittings, and Furniture.djvu/154

130 and merely reproduced the design of his predecessor. No doubt, however, Hooke had taken many hints from France, where, in the then palmy days of Louis XIV., architecture flourished much more than in England.

Buckingham House had been offered as an alternative site to Montague House, with surrounding fields which would have allowed room for extension; but it would have cost £30,000, while Montague House could be had for £10,000; it was also, and not unnaturally at a period when the Prime Minister lived in Lincoln's Inn Fields, considered a more outof-the-way situation than Bloomsbury. Before censuring the Government for parsimony, it should be recollected that £12,800 were paid for the repairs of the house, which had been estimated at £3,800. The noble proprietor, Lord Halifax, must have been glad to escape from this heavy obligation, and as he was a friend of the Duke of Newcastle's, private influence may have had something to do with the selection of his mansion as the national repository.

However this may have been, Montague House a really magnificent structure, with pictorial decorations of great merit was probably quite as well suited as any other private mansion to house its miscellaneous stores of books, manuscripts, coins, stuffed animals, shells, fossils, and reptiles in spirits. As the books were removed to the new building in 1838–39, not many now living can remember the appearance of the library when within its walls. Many more will remember the appearance of the