262 THE LIFE OF SIR JOSEPH BANKS 



bulk largely in the Banks Correspondence preserved at 

 South Kensington. 



There was once a proposal for a Belles-Lettres Society. 

 It could have been only from the prevailing habit of 

 approaching Sir Joseph Banks on any great project what- 

 ever that tended to mental culture, that induced his 

 friends to ask him to join on such an occasion. Mr. H. F. 

 Greville, writing from Brighton (June, 1807), puts the 

 question to him, on behalf of himself, Richard Payne 

 Knight, Lord Abercorn, and other men of taste, who 

 are concerned in promoting the scheme, and incidentally 

 raises the question whether it would be proper to hold the 

 meetings of the Society under the same roof as a place of 

 public entertainment. 



Banks 's reply is curious as a piece of self -revelation, 

 very rarely displayed in his correspondence with his 

 friends. The first-person-singular seldom occurs in his 

 letters, except as delivering an opinion or expressing his 

 wishes. We have had to judge him from his deeds, and 

 not from his confessions. For once, we get a faint glimpse 

 of the man himself from his own words. 



Sir Joseph Banks to Henry Fulke Greville. 



" SIR, I am thankful to you for your letter of the 

 sixth instant, which I should have answered sooner had 

 the printed paper which came to my house some days 

 ago been at hand. From the tenour of the printed paper 

 I conceived that I was invited to become a Member of 

 an intended Society, and that the Room in which the 

 Society was to meet was to be occasionally employed for 

 other purposes. Your letter has shown me my mistake. 

 I find from it that new rooms are to be built and ex- 

 clusively reserved for the use of the intended Society, and 

 that the Members of it are to be chosen by a Committee. 



