At the annual exposition of the Olympic games we have the feature of a
distribution of prizes. They were conferred, however, only on horses,
poets and athletes--a conjunction certainly in advance of the asses
and savants that constituted the especial care of the French army in
Egypt, but not up to the modern idea of the comprehensiveness of human
effort. While our artists confess it almost a vain hope to rival
the cameo brooch that fastened the scanty garment of the Argive
charioteer, or the statue spattered with the foam of his horses and
shrouded in the dust of his furious wheel--while they are content to
be teachable, moreover, by the exquisite embroidery and lacework
in gold and cotton thread displayed at another semi-religious and
similarly ancient reunion at Benares,--they claim the alliance and
support of many classes of craftsmen unrepresented on the Ganges or
Ilissus. These were, in the old days, ranked with slaves, many of whom
were merchants and tradesmen; and they labor yet in some countries
under the social ban of courts, no British merchant or cotton-lord,
though the master of millions, being presentable at Buckingham Palace,
itself the product of the counting-room and the loom. Little, however,
does this slight appear to affect the sensibilities of the noble army
of producers, who loyally rejoice to elevate their constitutional
sovereign on their implements as the Frankish prolétaries did upon
their shields.

The family of expositions with which we are directly concerned is,
like others of plebeian origin, at some loss as to the roots of its
ancestral tree. We may venture to locate them in the middle of the
eighteenth century. In 1756-57 the London Society of Arts offered
prizes for specimens of decorative manufactures, such as tapestry,
carpets and porcelain. This was part of the same movement with that