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

TO THE EDITOR OF TUE TIMES.

Sir,—l have anxiously looked over your columns for
pleadings in favour of the Crystal Palace. I have not
found all I wished. Permit me to add my mite.
In youth I loved to dream over Bacon's picture of his
New Atlantis; it was to me a fairy tale. In maturerdays
the .Novum Organum and the De Augmentis were not
less fondly loved. It was impossible to resist the natu-
ral impulse which leads one to gaze into the future and
trace the law of progress.
1. The park may have a little Atlantis—not a place
where emulous nations carry their rival productions, but
a place for the advancement of man. I would have
there every natural product classified and arrang ld of
from the the clays of China and of Devon to the.
Australia and of the Ural Mountains; not a
o
bi g
ggledy
piggledy squabble of different national products, but a
broad union of gifts bestowed by our Maker on man.
There is iron as good as that of Sweden or of
Northamptonshire, if it wore brought into Olio', for tho
purpose of making steel. Other stones than those of
Germany and France might serve for lithography, if
specimens of them could be brought together. A coin.
mittee would hardly be necessary to select stones for
another House of Parliament; nor would the fronts of
our colle,Yes at Oxford he any more face wh stone
which is inevitably doomed to rot with frost and
and crumble
away with the rain.
the
No one can calculate the value of a duee appreciation
of natural products. America' is opulent y cultiva-
tion of one or two plants • Staffordshire was enriched by
the discovery of a possible use for a few burnt flints;
hundreds of sorts of wood exist uncared for in Africa and
the East, while our drawing-rooms seldom go be a
little rose satin, or tulip woods. Strength, lightness,
and durability—say nothing of beauty—are not all com-
bined in mere mahogany.
On
of cur little
best o ermanptical instru sand de-
pends the excellence of many
ments; most probably quite as good might be found in
England, but no one looks for it. Not a plant, root,
earth, mineral ought to escape. There is other fibre
than than of flax; there is other downy product than
that of cotton.

- -
A PLEA FOR THE CRYSTAL PALACE.
Destroy the Crystal Palace and no metropolis will
be so destitute of spacious public buildings for the
exhibition of national objects and works of science
and art as that of Great Britain. Preserve the Crys-
tal Palace and no capital can boast of a building
better adapted by its capacity and illumination for all
the purposes that a well arranged exhibition
requires. If the building itself be not faultless,
according to the conventional ideas of architectural
proportions, it has a beauty and grandeur peculiarly
its own, and claims to be preserved as an exemplar of
an edifice at once the result and exponent of British
science, invention, and skill, as applied to the manu-
facture and combination of two of the least perishable
and most rapidly adaptable of building materials,—
glass and iron. If for no other purpose;such an illustra-
tion of the capabilities of these two characteristic Bri-
tish productions ought to be maintained as a favouring
condition of the multiplication of similar cheap and
effective modes of enclosing space, as the orgival of a
new style or order of architecture peculiarly suited
to our needs and our climate, and which must always
possess that beauty which flows from fitness and
adaptation to its objects.
But to what adequate purpose, it is asked, can the
Crystal Palace be applied ? This riddle is peremp-
torily proposed as proof against all appeals, and if the
answer is not satisfactory the official Sphynx, De-
struction, is to ensue.
But, were the needs for exhibition space of this
particular year not such as to cry out loudly for their
relief by the easy and obvious application thereto of a
building which, in its purposely unfinished state,*
has shown its power of resisting a winter's storms, as
well as its capacity for accommodating the 60,000
daily visitors of a world's show, should we be justified
in summarily destroying such unrivalled means of
meeting future " imperative demands for exhibition
space ?"
The plain truth, however, is, that at no previous
period had the requirements of an edifice like the
Crystal Palace, for the systematic arrangement and
due display of public collections,—needing only such
accommodation to fulfil their legitimate purposes of
instruction and incentive,—been more pressing than
at the present time.
Take the case of sculpture, for example. No
country in the world possesses such rich original il-
lustrations of the successive steps by which that
noble art has reached its climax as England, thanks
to the energies of some of her worthy sons ; and cer-
tainly no mother. country could have exhibited less
sympathy for their devotion, or a colder recognition
of their labours, if we may judge by the accommoda-
tion she has hitherto allotted to the inestimable trea-
sures contributed by an Elgin, a Townley, a Fellows,
a Salt, and a Layard.
Each new cargo of the marvellously preserved
monuments of Assyrian art that is deposited beneath
beneath
the Grecian portico at Bloomsburyflicuittse
despair by
f
groan-
ings, or is received with aspects of m
the unhappy and tantalized officialshe conditions of
of the already
over-crammed British Museum.
place, aspect, and light, essentialtothe adequate ex_
bibition of the sculptures, are there physically im-
possible, save for a small proportion. Classified ar-
rangement, illustrative sequence of the specimens, and
i:t o
space for contemplation
of mouofutotbel.rn prductions of the
elyctosurteoqfutihreinggue
to bne
.
viewed from every side,
are
Even for our annual crop
no better accommodation
chisel we afford at present
than a cellar. And yet we wonder that British
produce such abortions as the man
gateway, or the sculpture can
and horse on the Palace
cocked-hatted
mast-
headed, mutilated, Nelson, with his
appendage of coiled cable, which de
forms,
if finest site •
if not defiles, the Europe." As if any
other result should reasonably be expected in a nation
which neutralises the efforts of the collectors of the best
models in sculpture by ignoring them in their relation
to art, by housing them as mere elements of a series of
relics of bygone habits and customs, and by putting
them under the curatorship of an antiquary
in a crammed department of musty mummies
and other antiquities ! What the result might be in
relation to that art, in which a great nation is most
deeply interested as being the one to which she owes,
or ought to owe, the fittest or most durable monu-
ments of her worthiest sons and grandest achieve-
ments,
J a due display and collocation of the
ancient sculptures such nation may possess, might
be worth the while of a wise statesman to consider.
Were the specimens at hand, such an illustrative
series of the art might commence with the first rude
carvings by the races emerging from barbarism.
The deities and symbolic objects of reverence of
the Polynesians, Hindoos, and Chinese Bud-
dhists, might be followed by the sculptures and
monuments of Assyria and Egypt. The earlier
productions of the colonists of Greece and Asia
Minor would follow; and the Lycian -Eginetan, and
Selinuntine marbles would illustrate the succes-
sive steps by which the Greeks attained the per-
fection of the noble art in the times of Phidias and of
Praxitiles and Lysippus. Its gradual decline would
be next elucidated by the continuation of the pro-
posed series, in which the student might trace the
effects of the deviation from the sublime in the
attempt to realize sensuous beauty, and of the sub-
stitution of individuality and detail for simplicity and
grandeur of style ; such examples being furnished by
the relics of Roman cities in the works of sculpture
executed after the fall of Greece at the behests of her
luxurious conquerors.
In the original materials for so extensive
a series
illustrative of the rise, progress, and decline oesc sculp-
ture, ture, no country is so rich as England.
For
the
to so
display and consecutive arrangement essentialt
natural and profitable a method of exhibiting them no

- Is there any fine art in which a great nation ought
to take more interest than in sculpture ? Is there auy
kingdom which already possesses such rare and varied
illustrations of that noble art as England?
Is there any capital in Europe which can boast of
an edifice so amply and beautifully adapted, not
only for the reception and due display of our present
treasures, but for future accessions, as London At
present possesses in the convenient locality which the
Crystal Palace adorns ? It seems incredible that
any but those whose foolish vaticinations this buye
last year have been so signally unfulfilled, shoiuld
harbour the idea of wantonly destroying the hulloing
.
which is at hand, and which, if it be not, by the pt
fessed architect, deemed worthy to compete with St.
Paul's or Westminster Abbey, would be
visited so long as it was suffered to remain,. arseol'ene ut.:l
the wonders of London. The rumour of
(f
u)fs
oi our
r,Ce destructionoknet
Continental
tpa l
talreadynheeioae
oxnuc.
ridst
all-decried
cdr I
Whatetdh_ the
1. sqcsuohreanslitfltr:siblaPenr
saiddi
01
mea-
strosity,e
and pull down the Crystal Palace

nly
is; ui
gn
in,
theeuttht puttied
otai t line
libraryone *
side.
too!"
Evidence
----7—wdaens
eteeocorptcAorrotlernileranalinlo)uts:
t Answer No. 528.—"
Building in Hyde park.
and Answer
wirs(:3s3t4ht Then, again
the we
want some
value, would require to
hition were again be
wellthings of intriu,•ic
[the Exhibition] building, unj '96
protreted," &c.; up in
which th© Commission report
head of the department of Mr. Hawkins,
qouritviaelsuea t theuld Brignot ft) be
stmh,pil
feaaurjssrt:,,
,sru
t•gtshiisooi tt
inerndkods nos
igr -nityatiesu Objectionable
fortified,s,a and other
where coins.
and.
me-
to divide the collecti
resumed to durin the time of the Exi
adopted !"—Report and Evidence of the
Commission, £s-..c
P. vi.

The Earl f
3:74,urham has arrived in town from
LAmbton Castle, en route to Brighton.