for by two householders. This is said to be enough; as it is, those gain
admission who are worse than shabby--men in working clothes, and some
without shoes--they have been introduced by clergymen. The grant for
buying new books is seven or eight times larger than ours. When shall we
learn to spend our money in a sensible way?

In other matters they are not so successful, such as the Crystal Palace at
Sydenham, for instance, which formed the building for the Great
Exhibition, and which is now a sort of museum of curiosities. It is
gigantic, like London itself, and like so many things in London, but how
can I portray the gigantic? All the ordinary sensations produced by size
are intensified several times here. It is two miles in circumference and
has three stories of prodigious height; it would easily hold five or six
buildings like our Palace of Industry, and it is of glass; it consists,
first, of an immense rectangular structure rising toward the center in a
semicircle like a hothouse, and flanked by two Chinese towers; then, on
either side, long buildings descend at right angles, enclosing the garden
with its fountains, statues, summer houses, strips of turf, groups of
large trees, exotic plants, and beds of flowers. The acres of glass
sparkle in the sunlight; at the horizon an undulating line of green
eminences is bathed in the luminous vapor which softens all colors and
spreads an expression of tender beauty over an entire landscape.

Always the same English method of decoration--on the one side a park and
natural embellishments, which it must be granted, are beautiful and
adapted to the climate; on the other, the building, which is a monstrous
jumble, wanting in style, and bearing witness not to taste, but to English
power. The interior consists of a museum of antiquities, composed of
plaster facsimiles of all the Grecian and Roman statues scattered over
Europe; of a museum of the Middle Ages; of a Revival museum; of an