The Sun.
London, England, 1852-04-17 00:00:00

APRIL 17, 1852.
7

THE CRYSTAL PALACE.
(From the Times.)
There are in this metropolis rather more than two
millions of people, and it may be said of them, with
hardly an exception, that they reside in it only as lung
as they hare no other alternative. They reside for their
business, for their public duties, for the fashionable
season, and hie away to the green fields, to the moors,
to the coast, or the continent, the instant they have ac-
complished the last turn of the treadwheel. Those who
can, do this every day; those who cannot do more, do it
every year; and all indulge in the vision of a quiet old
ago, spent among evergreens and flower beds, and all
the soote ing sounds of nature,—any where, indeed, ex-
"Pt in this dingy, dirty, stencliv, smoky, noisy metro-
polis. All this it 80 familiar that it seems quite natu-
ral. But how can it be natural when it is not so in any
other metropolis, at least to nearly a like extent? It is
not so at Paris. People go there to live and die. flow
ie this? Among other reasons—for there are many—
not the least is the want of proper buildings, institu-
tiens, gardens, and promenades for public recreation,
health, and improvement. Not having a municipal
government, asd being dependent on precarious
fits of Parliamentary or Ministerial generosity, we
have to look chiefly to private speculation for
our amusement and instruction. The result is, that
there is little done for the great mass of the
people; and there is little done for any class in a grand
and satisfactory manner. They who reside in town the
whole year, and must reside there, know hoe. difficult
it is to find the means, not merely of diverting their own
minds for a few hours from painful thoughts or laborious
occupations, but for giving their children a useful holi-
day. This is our usual want. When young people,
and we may add old people, have been they know not
how many times to the British Museum, the Zoological
Gardens, the Polytechnic, the Moving Dioramas,
Hampton Court, and a few other more or less
accessible sights, they often ask what is there to see
'which they have not exhausted, and which they cannot
exhaust in an hour. Where will they find plenty of
cheerful company, happy children, well-dressed women,
moving about among an abundance of objects to interest
and please and improve them? If we put this question
ourselves, it is not to Timon in a cave, or Diogenes in a
tub. We are appealing to those who bare the hearts of
men, and who own themselves dependent on society and
external objects for the greater part of their happiness.
The question answers itself at once, for everybody would
have said, "We had such a place last year—we have
not such a place this year."
Yet there is no reason at all, nothing but the most
paltry considerations, to prevent our retaining, within
the Crystal Palace, a large and sufficient quantity of
those attractions which were found so admirably to
suit the wants of this metropolis last year. There was
nothing temporary in the nature of that Exhibition, ex-
cept in its cost; and to some extant its incompleteness,
for, had it been for a permanency, it would have been
done better. There was nothing temporary in collec-
tions to illustrate the productions of nature and the pro-
gress and variety of art. There was nothing temporary
in magnificent specimens of that sort, which are often
the heirlooms of noble or royal families. There was
nothing temporary in the collection of casts and bronzes,
fountains, models, masterpieces of manufacture, and
trophies of material or of art. There was nothing tem-
porary in the company, except that it was more
inconveniently numerous than it would be in
a permanent exhibition. There was nothing
temporary in the purpose ; nothing in the
voluntary and self-supporting character of the
Exhibition; nothing in the management. There is
is no weighty reason, then, why, in a certain moderate
degree, we should not have the Exhibition of 1852 natu-
ralized in Hyde-park. Nay, as we have intimated, there
are many great improvements that might be made, in
the event of its permanent maintenance—gardens of va-
rious temperatures for the different seasons, galleries for
the display of pictures, antiquities, and curiosities of too
bulky a character for museums. All this might be
done, and last year's experience proves that it might be
done. If the feasibility of a permanent Exhibition is
cavilled at now, the feasibility of the Great Exhibition
was cavilled at little more than a twelvemonth ago. The
present opposition is precisely as groundless, as selfish,
as frivolous us that was; it is only a little more wily and
quiet. Grown wise by experience, the malignants now
work under ground. But the opposition is substantially
the same, and the object of that opposition is substan-
tially the same as it was in the autumn of 1850. In
both cases there is a noble and a simple plan for public
improvement and recreation, and an array of petty pre-
judices and local interests against it.
As for the host of small objections, it is scarcely ne-
cessary to waste a word upon them—in the first place,
because they aro really infinitesimal, and then because
the question notoriously does not depend on them. No
man in his senses can doubt for a moment, from his own
knowledge, besides the evidence given before the late
Commission, and set at nought by it, that it would coat a
mere trifle to make the building capable of standing
many years, to keep it in repair, to divide it into proper
divisions for various purposes, to warm it in cold
weather, to provide guardians, end everything else ne-
cessary. To make a winter garden, to get casts of all
the best sculpture in the world, to procure models of
great cities and mountains, and, pace pacatorum, models
of land and naval battles, to transfer hither some of the
shiploads of antiquities now packed into the corners
and cellars of the Museum, to place here the won-
derful plants a hundred and fifty feet long always
arriving from the Antipodes—all this is only a
question of horses and men; and if, as one of the wit-
nesses observed to the late Commission, a locomotive
weighing more than forty tons can be drawn through
London, placed in the Exhibition, and then taken away
again without the public knowing anything about it,
there is no difficulty whatever in filling the building just
as is thought best. But, in fact, all the minor objections
are set at rest for ever by the offer now made by private
persons to take the building off the hands of Govern-
ment, and give us a permanent Exhibition at their own
risk; of course under proper regulations. All the non-
sense about the thin glass, the rain, and the hail—the
sashes of green wood, the cost of coal and coke, the ex-
pense of police, and all the rest of it, is thus dis-
missed in a moment. If Parliament—and to Parliament
the question must ultimately be left—will only let
others undertake it, we shall have an Exhibition not
quite so showy, so glittering, so mercantile, or
crowded as it was last year, but all the better adapted
for constant use. We do not want all the Palais
Royal, or all Manchester, all Sheffield, all Leeds, or all
Cornwall in the Exhibition. We can do with less of
these things. But there is much to take their place. If
it answers, and if the Exhibition becomes constantly
popular, we presume that will be considered a success.
But there is the rub. The malignants are afraid, not
that the Exhibition in its new form will be a failure, but
that it will draw too constantly and too well. "We
shall never have Hyde-park to ourselves. We shall
always have Piccadilly choked with busses and cabs, and
always have that ugly building before our drawing-room
windows." As for the said drawing-rooms, as the offer
now before us comprehends pecuniary compensation to
the owners of property said to be injured, that is a ques-
tion of X. s. d. As to the vulgarizing of the Park, the
dust at Knightsbridge, and the stoppage of Piccadilly,
we really do not calculate on an average attendance of
more than ten thousand persons a-day, and that will be
hardly a sensible addition to the traffic of that tho-
roughfare. But, as this is only the real objection,
and the only one at all likely to be fatal, we
will just take the liberty to ask whether the
present First Commissioner of her Majesty's Works
and Public Buildings is exactly the man to defend
Hyde-park from the foot of the labouring man, and
British aristocracy from plebeian contact? What was
the meaning of all those little books full of quaint bal-
lads and sentimental poems, describing the lords of
the soil as the natural leaders and associates of the
people in their business, their sports, and their reli-
gion? Was it were sentiment? Was it the iuvuivii-
tary weakness betrayed by Nero when he wept for the
execution of a crimival? Was it mere twaddle? Should
Lord John Manners be the man to drive London out
of Hyde-park, and to deprive all classes of the most
successful reunion they have had for many a year, the
last and least favourable explanation of Lord John
Manners's early poems will be adopted. It is to Parlia-
ment, however, that the appeal must now be made.