America by assembling the fresh triumphs of European art, so wonderful
to us in their decay, with the still more novel productions of
Portuguese India and Spanish America. But the length of sea--voyages
prosecuted in small vessels with imperfect knowledge of winds and
currents, and the difficulties of land-transportation when roads
were almost unknown, would have restricted the display to meagre
proportions, particularly had Vienna been the site selected. Few
visitors could have attended from distant countries, and the masses of
the vicinage could only have stared. The idea, indeed, of getting up
an exhibition to be chiefly supported by the intelligent curiosity of
the bulk of the people would not have been apt to occur to any one.
The political and educational condition of these was at the end of the
century much what it had been at the beginning. Labor and the laborer
had gained little.

The weapon-show, depicted in _Old Mortality_, and the market-fair, as
vivid in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, exemplify the expositions of
those days. To them were added a variety of church festivals, or
"functions," still a great feature of the life of Catholic countries.
Trade and frolic divided these among themselves in infinite gradation
of respective share, now the ell-wand, and now the quarter-staff or
the fiddler's bow, representing the sceptre of the Lord of Misrule.
"At Christe's Kirk on the Grene that day" the Donnybrook element would
appear to have predominated. The mercantile feature was naturally
preferred by gentle Goldy, and the hapless investor in green
spectacles may be counted the first dissatisfied exhibitor on record
at a modern exposition, for he skirts the century.

Looking eastward, we find these rallies of the people, the
time-honored stalking-grounds of tale-writers and students of