The Sun.
London, England, 1857-05-01 00:00:00

- Shortly after c:glit o'clock yesterday mornin
her Majesty's Lord Chamberlain arrived at Glou-
cester House, *hen orders were issued to her Ma-
jesty's upboNterers, Messrs. Banting and Son, of
St. ' James's-street, Piccadilly, f r the nec ssary
arrangements for her Royal _Highness's funeral.
In accordance with the desire of the late Duchess,
the-funeral proceedings will be .conducted in a eoni7
paratively private manner, with the exception of
the presence of a detachment of the Life Guards to
escort the funeral cortege to the terminus of the
Great Western Railway, Paddington. Nothing
beyond the ord.ina7 display observable .at the
funeral of a private individual will take 'place.
Orders were received yesterday morning at
Windsor for the opening of the royal mausoleum
in St. George's Chapel. The remains of the illus.-
trio-us deceased will be placed by the side of her
_
royal husband.

THE " GRSAT EASTERN."

An old proverb says that " there is nothing new
under the sun." With regard to travel abroad, and
its ordinary sigh's, this may be true. Everybedy
knows all about the C. imea. Constantinople, and
the gaudyevretchelness of the East, is as hackneyed
as- Otteapside. Most Blanc is as well known as
Primrose-hill. The Pyramids exhibit huge posters
about " Warren's Jet." Ararat, w:th its unbroken
solitude of ages, has been invaded ; and even the
grim icy caverns of the Arctic regions withhold no
secrets. The last of the exclusive places is about
to be opened to us ; and what between correspon-
dents, amat .urs, and artists, Hong Kong will soon
be as familiar as the Isle of Dogs, and the mystery
of the internal domestic economy of the Celestial
Empire a thing of no account.
What remains to be seen ? Where is a man to go
for a new sensaton or a novel sight? We think we
can say. On either side of the river, in the midst of
these dreary regions known as East Greenwich and
Millwall, where the atmosphere is tarry, and every-
thing seems slimy and amphibious, where it is bard
to say whether the land has been recc'ied from the
water or t'n water encroached upon the land,
where the shops sell anchors, ship's cables, how-
itzers, hemp, hammocks, and other rantical re-
maius, or at most only rise • to the elegancies cf
tarpauliog suits, limp sou' westers, and such lice
weather beat en fuxuries,—two gigantic
.schemes are
in progress, which, if not entre novelt'es, are at
hetet as near approaches to it as this geom ration is
ever likely to witness. That at East Greenwich is
the manufacture of the great At'auCc Submarine
Telegraph ; at bill lwall lies Scott Russell's leviathan
Ship the Great Eastern. At the former place the
visitor (if not also a shareholder) can realise the
great idea. There in a comparatively small compass,
cAI over c-Ul, till the eye is pained and dazzled in
attempts ter follow it, lies the monstrous cable, like
the endle s sn tke of the Scandinavian mythology,
which was said to. encircle the world. But with the
Great Eafeern steamship the case is different. It is
difficult, if not entirely impossible, for the mind to
appreciate and realise its immense hulk at once.
The visitor notches no glimpse of it till he enters
Scott Russell's yard, when, though the ship is still
at a considerable distance, it seems suddenly t ) shut
him in—a mount sin of metal across his ; ath—while
all around are scattered ponderous mosses of giriers,
fuant ls, bulkhead=, bodere and machinery, like the
debris of some colossal iron world. So vast is the
bulk of the huge:/ark that from no one point, save
at the riser's side, cin the eye take iu its whole
proportions, and even then its immensity is so great
in comparison with all the notions previously con-
ceived of monster ships that it seems to elude cern-
prehunsion and weigh upon Ile mind—a kind of
iron nightmare—a phenomi.non, hard_ and unrealis-
able. It is useless looking at it, so you try by details
to bring the mind to an approximation of i's
wander about the yard in search of familiar objects
which may restore to,their inn your dis-
ordered ideas of proportion. On the ground Icm
something like a field of red' iron with a kind of
hedge of the same meterial all round it, and on this
you walk unto you find it t ) lnthe last and. smal-
est of the bulkheads or water-tight compa'tneuts,
and which in the course of a day or so will be lifted
bodily 100 feet into the air, and placed in the stern
of the ship. Again disturbed in your fancies, yon
seek refuge iu the contemplation of a labyrinth of
Bp ,kes and' stays, a semi-circle of iron like the sup-
ports of a building—wider across than King Wil-
liam-street, larger than the circus at Amtiey's, and
which 'instinct soon tells you con be nothing less
than part of one of the great ship's paddle-wheels.
By this time, half used to the Br obdignagian word
around, the visitor can coolly walk down a couple
of long iron tunnels, which iu lightnese cheerful-
ness, and general population, remind him forcibly
of the Burlington-arcade. He knows these are two
out of five of the ship's chimneys, but is reconciled
t r the fact and foals that on the whole they are
quite what he expected. So' with a row of red build-
ings which at first look like houses and seem the
iron suburbs of the vast edifice which towers above
them. These are the boilers, though the wildemt
ideas as to their use seems to pervade the mass o
visitors who peep in at the manholes. They are
evidently looked upon (especially by the ladies) as
mere iron technicalities quite dist:nct from the ship,
though useful in some remote and unexplained de-
gree=probably as mode's, or as adjuucts t ) the
captain's toilet-. Each of these boilers, however,
weighs 45 tons, and is intended to work at a pre :-
sure of 251 b. to the square inch. • Some have alfearly
been tested with the hydraulic pump, w:th a force
of upwards of 601 b. per square inch, and proved so
soiid and faultless in their construction that a pres-
sure of 100 lb. might have been applied with safety.
The sight of such objects as these around gra-
dually restores_ the visitor's mind, and predis-
poses him for appreciating bulk ,at least.
He somehow expects to find everything
large and in keeping with the "monster
of the deep," and turns with disappoint-
ment from the aspect of tall fact3ries and large trees
which aredwarfed to things of paltry insignificance.
In this frame of mind, if he ware to'd that the
steam-cradle, which high over a'l in a massive
framework of oaken beams lifts up the boilers and
other sundries was fixed there for the purpose of
hoisting in the ship's teleocepe, he would take the
information as a matter of course, and be in no
way surprised or moved by the announcement.
But we mu-t go to the ship itself, though none are
in a hurry at first to mount its lofty sides. Built
near it is a tall framework, or rather a wooden
tower, by means of which, after toiling up a flight
of 94 steps, the deck is gained at last. Here, no
matter how much the previous sights may 'have
prepared.the ideas, the ship viewed from the deck
as one greatwhole, or rather as much of the great
whole as can be seen, fer all cannot, is quite be-
yond the grasp of ordinary comprehensions to rea-
lise. In fact it is like anything but the deck of a
ship, though nothing but the deck of the ship is like
it. Some of our readers very probably have been
on the roof of the Crystal Palace or G. eat Exhibi-
tion while building. Let them recal either of those
scenes=-the webs of scaffolding, the groups of forges,
the cradles and winches, the girdrs, pillars, and
plates, the white-heat rivets, the punching machines,
the monstrous screws, and above all the bellowing
din of by no means distant thunder, and they can
form some idea, though but a faint one, of the deck
of the Great Eastern.
It is very difficult for any amount of description
to 'convey an adequate 'lotion of a vessel which is
18,000 tons larger than the largest shipin the world.
It may, perhaps, be gained by tbe visitor who walks
teethe edge of thei vessel, looketup and down the
Thames, surveys the domes of Greenwich Hospital,
has a bird's,eye view on to the decks of large West
Indiamen, and wonders at the diminutive proportions
of the old 3-decker used as. the Seamen's Hospital.
Or, better still, if he turns his glass from the river and
peers cautiously over the edge of the space where
the upper and lower saloons for the cabin passengers
by: the Great Eastern are to be coustructed. It
seems like looking from a housetop into some ordi-
nary metropolitan square, or the court of an exten-
sive French hotel, at the bottom of which even the
noise of the workmen is subdued, for they are 60
feet beneath-the spectator. lii spite, however, of
these aids to appreciatien of its size, one must resort
to figures at last in order to understand the monster
fully. Her length, then, between the perpendicu-
'Ars is 680 feet ; length on the upper deck, 692 feet
...within 28 feet of double the length of the. height