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

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIDIES.

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 maturer days
the Novum Organum and tho 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 ot man. I would have
there every natural product classified and arranged—
from the clays of China and of Devon to the gold of
Australia and of the Ural Mountains; not II higgledy-
piggledy squabb!o 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 were brought into notic.:s, for the
purpose of making steel. Other stones than those of
Germany and France might serve for lithography, if
tiler A re.
specimens of them could be brought t°ge
select. stone
mitten would hardly be necessary to Stones for
another House of Parliament; nor would the fronts of
faced with stone
our colleges at Oxford be any more
which is inevitably doomed to rot with frost and crumble
away with the rain.
No one can calculate the value of a due appreciation
of natural products. America is opulent by the cultiva-
tion of one or two plants • Staffordshire was enriched by
the d'scovery of a possible us© for a few burnt flints;
hundreds of aorta ot wood exist uncared for in Africa and
the East, while our drawing rooms seldom go beyond a
little rose satin, or tulip woods. Strength, lightness,
of beauty
and durability—say nothing are not all com-
bined in 'nevi mahogany.
On a little German sand de-
pends the excellence ot many of our best optical instru-
ments;quite as good
most probably might be found in
England, bu.. Lo one looks for it. Nut a plane, root,
earth, mineral ought to escape. There is other fibre
than than of flax; there is other downy product than
that of cotton.

[PRICE SD.

2. Still more would the place serve for a standing
Polytechnic in works of art. Every description of valve,
crank, spindle, joint, bevelled wheel, screw, axle, lever,
&0., ought there to stand in order. One hour's inspec-
tion is worth a month of hard work at books. Detail
to obviate difficulties is invaluable to the inventor.
Hours of ill-spent labour might thus be spared to the
half-aught ingenious mechanic.
Hundreds of machines were not represented in the
Exhibition. A standing institution would obviate this.
Why, too, should not every new hinge, lock, or even
kitchen vessel, have a place where its merits might be-
come known? Our cerefort is dependent on these vulgar
trifles, Thousands of pounds are gained by the produc •
tion of a night-light or a superior lucifer match. Nothing
really deeerves contempt.
stalnzegd hardlycollection
u )
tiomeir
mention the immense importance of a
philosophical instruments.
Not a now book, print, not a picture or statue, but
might there address itself to the eyes and tastes of the
public. Does not the world recollect how the Crayons
in Westminster-hall taught the Royal Acidevey men
that there was other charcoal in existence? A poor
artist has no chance of becoming known.
Again, everybody pities the poor farmer. Suppose,
instead of expensive agricultural meetings, ho could go
at any moment and see all which could be seen in the
implement department. He would find it convenient
whenever he came to London,, especially if ho could
personally inspect the beat collection of seeds in the
world, say nothing of all sorts of oilcake, broken rice,
Indise corn, and feeding stuff. Much, too, might be
-done in the way of farmyard models, suggestive of the
neatest process of making muck and money; the former
would soon be protected much more than it is.
Not a pattern, not a model ought to escape the prying
purveyors for the World's Museum. The eye can only
by degrees be trained for design. Our humbler artists
have but an indifferent chance. Oar northern clime does
not bestow the seggeefive flora cf the East; nor have
our common people the geometiTeal training which pro-
duced the pattern of the Alhambra. Idolatry does not
task our energies tp produce the ideal of the marvellous.
Even the antiquary, with his spectacles on his nose,
might have a sacred corner. The British Museum does
not contain everything in the world; no, not by a very
great deal.

It is all very well to say that last year did its work. I
beg leave to insinuate that it was all hurry, flurry, and
smell. Nobody could get at things in a quiet way. More-
over, people never learn much when they gape with
astonishment. They had not time to settle down and
think.

I wonder what the railway people and the steam na-
vigation companies are doing. Make England a central
spot, and you will not depriciate railway shares any how.
One never goes to Sheffield or Manchester without see-
ing lots of foreigners staring about and trying to see
what they can. Lien there have told me that no visitors
are more welcome. They see and buy, and come to buy
again, especially now that we do a little in return.
There is not an inventor, not a man of genius who
would not reap benefit.
Lastly, for educational purposes it would be invalu-
able. One could write a book on this one point of the
argument.
If it be said that the building is not perfect. Granted.
It is rather like a long square spout, to look down the
nave. Bat this might be improved; basides, nobody
knocks down an indifferent tent when the choice is be-
tween that or none. We might remedy that defect.
If the holders of property near are so seriously in-
jured, I must remind them that the barracks and two or
three non-savoury localities are just as near, and are
apparently cherished objects in that locality.
I have not attempted to fill up the argument. lam
no enthusiast. I wish every ono would ponder over the
far-sighted Instantice of Bacon and endeavour to grasp
the idea of the possible utility of the thing. lam argu-
ing, not from a feeling of satisfaction at that which was
done last year, but for a deep sense of the thousands of
defects, gaps, and short• comings of the far-famed ephe-
mera of 1851.

I have the honour to be, Sir, yours most obediently,
Highgate. A. B.

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 orginal 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 ne 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, I
a Salt, and a Layard.
Each new cargo of the marvellously
monuments of Assyrian art that is beneathdeposited
the Grecian portico at Bloomsbury elicits fresh
ds despair by
groan-
ings, or is received with aspects of mutethee
already
the unhappy and tantalized officialsheof preserved
conditions of
over-crammed British Museum.
place, aspect, and light, essentialt
to be
ex-
hibition of the sculptures, are there
e the
physically
adequate
im-
possible,u Classifiedon s
seque:tcere. Iy:out of the question.
save for a small propclorftitol% specimens,
ar-
rangement, illustrative
forfro
from every
we and
. wonder_ that British
vspieawceed
modern rd t- n.
peliadtei,oanreoffn objects requiring
of the
better aanoinuasuation
chisel Even for our annual
jimu p
than a cellar. And Ye'
sculpture can produce such abortions as the man
and horse on the Palace gateway, or the mast-
headed, mutilated, cocked -hatted Nelson, with his
doge of coiled cable,
coprolitic appendage which deforms,
if not defiles, the finest site in 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 und 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, by 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 jEginetan, and.
Selinuntine marbles would illustrate the succes-
sire 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 of sculp-
ture, ture, no country is so rich as England. For
' to so
display and consecutive arrangement essentialthem no
natural and profitable a method of exbibiti g