cation of fountains, fireworks and fiddle-bows. The
palace of industry has become the palace of the industrial--abundantly
useful still if it lure him from the palace of gin. The chrism of
Thackeray's inaugural ode will not have been dishonored.

[Illustration: CORK EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.]

The first of the great fairs, in so many respects a model to all
that came after, was beset at the outset by the same difficulty in
arrangement encountered by them. How to reconcile the two headings of
subjects and nations, groups of objects and groups of exhibitors, the
endowments and progress of different races and the advance of mankind
generally in the various fields of effort, was, and is, a problem only
approximately to be solved. It was yet more complicated in 1851 from
the compression of the entire display into one building of simple and
symmetrical form, instead of dispersing certain classes of objects,
bulky and requiring special appliances for their proper display, into
subsidiary structures--the plan so effectively employed in Fairmount
Park. A sort of compromise was arrived at which rendered possible the
mapping of both countries and subjects, especially in the reports, and
to some extent in the exhibition itself, without making the spectacle
one of confusion. The visitor was enabled to accomplish his double
voyage through the depths of the sea of glass without a great deal
of backing and filling, and to find his log, after it was over,
reasonably coherent.

The articles displayed were ranged under thirty heads. The
preponderance of matter of fact was shown in the concession of four of
these to raw material, nineteen to manufactures, and _one_ to the
fine arts. Twenty-nine atoms of earth to one of heaven! Of course the
one-thirtieth whereinto the multiform and elastic shape of genius was
invited, like the afreet into his chest, to condense itself, had to
be subdivided--an intaglio and a temple, a scarabaeus and a French
battle-picture, being very different things. This was accomplished,
and the Muses made as comfortable as could be expected. They soon
asserted the pre-eminence theirs by right divine, and came to be the
leading attraction of the affair, next to the Koh-i-noor. On this
barbaric contribution of the gorgeous East the French observers, a
little jealous perhaps, were severe. One of them says: "They rely on
the sun to make it sparkle," and, when the fog is too thick, on gas.
The curiosity about it, in th