Welsh Journals

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varicate. Powell then issued an ultimatum that he would withdraw his offer unless a suitable room was made available by 1 August 1872. The Library Committee finally agreed to erect a new building behind the Town Hall for the Museum and Library but a significant number of rate-pay- ers opposed the location which was not considered sufficiently central to the town. After more prevarication by the Council and threats by Powell to with- draw his offer, permission to borrow the necessary funds was refused and the whole scheme was abandoned. On 4 March 1879, Powell wrote: 'I intended to endow the town of Aberystwyth with a collection of pictures, objects of art, antiquities and curiosities. Repulsed by more than coldness and indiffer- ence, with which my offer was received, (two or three exceptions shining out of the Methodistic gloom) I withdrew my offer. Perhaps this was for the best. We do not know exactly what he had offered the town, but it was said at the time to be worth £ 5,000. However, between 1879 and 1882 he gave some items 'not essential to the decoration of my present little den' to the University Museum and some, if not all of these may have been destined for the town museum. They were mostly non-sci- entific and included enamels, limoges candlesticks, miniatures, a Moroccan bowl, Italian ceramics, armorial plates, two Turner watercolours, a Constable oil painting, two Rossetti drawings and two Burne Jones draw- ings, and apparently no local material. Most survives in the University col- lection and none of it is of outstanding merit or value. Indeed, there is evi- dence that much of it was kept by the University in store and thus survived the fire of 1885. It is unlikely, considering the funding available, that the collection would have been looked after very well by the town. Whether the establishment of a museum with the library would have formed the basis of good displays which would have attracted visitors to the town and of which the local pop- ulation would have been proud, or simply that it would be what was described at the time a white elephant.buried behind the Town Hall' is impossible to tell. It is unlikely that it would ever have been a Glyn Vivian or a Cyfarthfa. It seems more likely that it would have gathered dust and taken up the space which might have been occupied by local antiquities and bygones for which the Antiquarians fought during the next 100 years. The University Museum Once the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, was established in 1872, a