modest purpose of accomplishing, say four or five per cent. of social good, than to set out at once with the determination of putting ninetynine parts of the habitable globe to rights, hardly allowing so much as the possible loss of a hundredth.

Forgetting and forgiving those bygone fallacies of hope, which have this at least to be said in their excuse, that without them the Crystal Palace would never have been built at all, let us look around, and behold Paxton's monument in the bewildering circumspection A vene

rable white beaver hat, rather briskly and sternly disposed to question anybody's right of brushing it the wrong way, seems to be sadly want ing from the view. It covered, whenever its owner took a walk, all the plans of this huge, or, let us say, grand cucumber-frame. Mr. Paxton, knighted in '51 for his design of the Exhibition building, was, above all things, a gardener. There is a story of somebody who cut a great figure in the fashionable world, less by his wealth, which was prodigious, than by his accomplishments, which were beyond all telling. One night he let a kindred spirit, a young man coming on town, into his secret. He laid bare to him the heart of his mystery. The two had been everywhere, and had seen everything. In all London interiors, the darling of fortune had shone with such conspicuous and unmatchable brilliancy as to win the admiration even of men. His companion, in particular, had envied him, without the bitterness of envy. So, when they were alone, in slippered ease, confidence was ingenuously won by the younger man's frank outpouring of sincere flattery. Then it was that the rich and the rarely-gifted personage, in a mood half kindly and half cynical, told his fresher friend that he, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, the observed of all observers, was leading partner in a large grocery establishment, and dealt principally in pickles. You -you a grocer!' cried the youth. 'No; impossible! I cannot, will not, believe it.' 'Nevertheless,' rejoined the man of god-like presence,

it is true; I am grocerer than you

VOL. XV.-NO. LXXXVII,

can imagine a fellow to be; I am the grocerest of human creatures.' Poor Sir Joseph, on the contrary, did not think, or appear to think, that his distinction was that of being the easily-principal gardener of the universe. He shrank somehow from the chief honour which lay continually in his path, and would probably not have objected if he had seen an inferior horticulturist stoop to pick it up. 'Ah! brother,' as a certain delighful artist of humour and melancholy might have said, 'which of us has what he wants? which of us wants what he has?' I dare say if I could play a lion even better than I know that I can play it, I should yearn the more madly to play Bottom the Weaver.

I am far from saying-indeed, it would be absurd to say-that Sir Joseph hid his talent. These very gardens and terraces, these mounds of geranium-bloom, and pyramids of roses, these winding paths and groups of colour, skilfully disposed to catch the eye at every turn, avouch the contrary. Nor is there warrant for the assumption that he who laid out this great pleasureground would have done wisely to leave a builder's work for other hands. It was a bold and successful thought to magnify houses of glass into palaces of crystal; but it was the thought of a gardener, who had been all his life planning greenhouses and conservatories, as well as lawns, and shrubberies, and flower-beds. And there is, I cannot help thinking, matter for very grave protest in the theory which has been so long and persistently maintained by Paxton's admirers, that the sagacious old gardener actually struck out a new type of 'modern English architecture. There is, properly speaking, no architecture at all in the glazed iron frame of the Sydenham Palace. To have urged this truth on Sir Joseph Paxton would have been needless cruelty. The mere hint of it vexed and angered him; and there was, perhaps, no conceivable arguinent that he would have been less fitted to hear with equanimity than the argument which struck at his pretension to rival Wren and supplant the honours of

P

Inigo Jones. Who could find it in his heart to grudge Sir Joseph his really pardonable vanity? Had he not hit upon the very best design for the very biggest building in the world by merely sketching on a blotting-pad the elevation of one of his Chatsworth palm-houses?

And there the building is; shorn of its fair proportions, injured by tempest and flame, alas! but still a wonderful building, wonderfully furnished forth; and would you ask where in it stands Sir Joseph Paxton's monument, I say, look round. Look at the far-reaching reticulation of iron-work, spread to encompass all the marvels and beauties of nature, science, and art. Look at the loveliest flowers, the most gracefully, bending plants, reflected by the water from whose margin and very midst they spring. Look at those crowds of people, who are also observant; for in them, as much as in the objects they regard, is an enduring memorial of the architectgardener. Among them on all days of the year-on the patrician Saturdays of the opera season, when birds of gay plumage are convoked by birds of rare voice, and the centre transept is a sight never to be forgotten by him who has once seen it; on the ordinary shilling days, when excursionists roam with happy heedlessness of plan from picture-gallery to porter-pump, and from the top of the tower to the bottom of the grounds; on popular occasions, Licensed Victualistic festivals, Foresters' festivals, festivals of Odd Fellowship, and of all institutions given to festivity; on days of bird-shows, flower shows, archery meetings, athletic sports, all holidays in the calendar and out of it-the ample white beaver hat is missing as a once familiar and patriarchal presence-a genius of the place, that should be there as constantly as the excellent manager and his walkingstick, or as the back hair and bâton of the chef d'orchestre. That things so permanent in their seeming character should be as fugitive as the shadows on terrace and fountain; briefer than the prologue, which was no less brief than woman's love! The sense of a loss, and a want that

we may vainly long to fill, the yearning after days and glories that are irrevocable, shall not, however, keep me from a single day's enjoyment of scenes that I have haunted summer and winter for fifteen years. I have heard those say who have official duties at the Crystal Palace, that custom has not staled for them its infinite variety-a sufficient proof that the variety is infinite as well as charming. Many inhabitants of the pleasant neighbourhood which has grown round the palace gardens must be almost as regular in their attendance as the secretary and the clerks. I dare say these young ladies, whom our artist has depicted as a segment of the Saturday audience, are constant frequenters. They have the quiet look of habit, the appreciative but unsurprised expression which contrasts in a very noticeable manner with the bewildered stare of novices who have never read, or have failed to follow, the injunction of Horace, not to admire.' I don't think they are ennuyées, bored, or blasées; I hope they are above the petty affectation of being so; for I think there can be no doubt that this affectation is infinitely more vulgar than the undisguised and, if you will, the foolish marvelling of the many. Perhaps they may not be altogether insensible to the tedium of too much overlearned music, though they do not yawn or close their eyes. I have sometimes wished, like Christopher Sly, that 'a good piece of work' were 'ended.' There is this excuse, too, at the Crystal Palace, for such Gothic distaste of the subtle beauties of harmony that surrounding objects and noises are wont to beckon away the attention. I have sat through a symphony without being able to take my eyes from an inflated bladder-elephant, carried up from a toy-stall by the specific levity of hydrogen gas, and pulled down again by a string abdominally attached to his form. Ninety-six ascents of this ludicrous paradox of airy bulk I counted while the fiddles performed the neverending still-beginning movements of Op. something or other. Funny at first, but maddening by repe