the inevitable Prince Albert, failed to draw like the things which
flattered the lust of the eye; as the pigs and pumpkins of an
"agricultural horse-trot" attract but a wayside glance from the
procession to the grand stand. We are all dwellers in a vast
picture-gallery, with frescoed dome above and polychromed sculpture
and mosaic pavement on the floor below. Its merits we perceive, enjoy
and interpret according to our individual gifts and education. But it
makes amateurs in some sort of every mother's son or daughter, of us;
and we hasten to plunge, confident each in his particular grammar of
the beautiful, into the study of what imitative gallery may be offered
us. Though the financial idea may have been uppermost in the minds of
the devotees of the Mountain of Light, and their pleasure in the march
past that of a stroll through the vaults of the Bank of England, they
also expected to see in it the combined brilliance of all diamonds.
Not finding that, we dare say few of them paid it a second visit, but,
led by a like craving for dazzle, sought more legitimate intoxication
in marble, canvas, porcelain and chased and cast metals.

There they saw the diamond put into harness by the Hindus and used
for drilling gems as it is now for drilling railway tunnels. In the
carpets and shawls of the same region was to be traced an exact and
unfaltering instinct for color, the tints falling into their proper
places like those of the rainbow--the result not a picture, any more
than the rainbow is a picture, but a blotted study rubbed up with the
palette-knife, or what in music would be a fantasia.

[Illustration: MUNICH EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1854.]

From the Asiatic display, more complete by far than any before known,
the eye passed to the works of the more disciplined hand and fancy and