e dining-room; but
by this time I suppose the parlour reformation will be nearly
completed, and you will soon be able to return to your old quarters.
The letter you sent me this morning was from Mary Taylor. She
continues well and happy in New Zealand, and her shop seems to answer
well. The French newspaper duly arrived. Yesterday I went for the
second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three
hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than
at my first visit. It is a wonderful place--vast, strange, new, and
impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in _one_
thing, but in the unique assemblage of _all_ things. Whatever human
industry has created, you find there, from the great compartments
filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill-machinery in full
work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every
description--to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded
with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the
carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth
hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a
fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have
created. It seems as if magic only could have gathered this mass of
wealth from all the ends of the earth--as if none but supernatural
hands could have arranged it thus, with such a blaze and contrast of
colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the
great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence.
Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was
there, not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement
seen--the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea
heard from the distance.

'Mr. Thackeray is in high spirits about the success of his lectures.
It is likely to add largely both to his fame and purse. He has,
however, deferred this week's lecture till next Thursday, at the
earnest petition of the duchesses and marchionesses, who, on the day
it should have been delivered, were necessitated to go down with the
Queen and Court to Ascot Races. I told him I thought he did wrong to
put it off on their account--and I think so still. The amateur
performance of Bulwer's play for the Guild of Literature has lik