The Museum

In the high street of my county town, the county museum flanks the Church of St. Michael and All Angels. This church was much restored within—without, it was equipped with a high railing along the pavement’s inner edge—at about the time that the museum was opened. That was just 100 years ago, and the County Museum is marking its centenary with an exhibition of photographs taken by the rector of St. Michael’s at that time. I am fond of our museum with its wrought-iron Gothic pillars, its stuffed birds, its potsherds, and its two rooms devoted to the great writer. I even forgive it the regulation against smoking. It is well-kept, informative, and at times surprising.

The critic whom I was entertaining was an old friend, or at least an old acquaintance. In the years that we had known one another, however, we had drifted apart, hc to ever-fresher woods of fashion in the arts and progress in the sciences, I to my own affairs and interests in and about this county town. Now he had come to stay, stuffed with his latest new ideas, ideas so frequently refashioned in these last twenty years that they had about them a sort of staleness of novelty. Perhaps he, for his part, had imagined that I might have thought up something even newer since last we had met, and I fear that his disappointment must at least have equalled my own: for our conversations were very dull and spasmodic. And therefore, since I was his host and we had totally run out of subjects to talk about, and there were still some two hours before his train was due to leave, and since we happened to be walking past the museum, I suggested that we go in. Perhaps our county town, 100 years ago, might interest him, or at least provide him with a subject to be amusing about, later that day, to his up-to-date friends in London.