Austria with Monti's veiled heads, henceforth to be credited to
Lombardy; Prussia with Rauch; and Denmark with Thorwaldsen--all pure
form, copied without color from Nature, from convention and from
the antique. Then came design and color united in ceramics--in
the marvelously delicate flowers of Dresden, purified in the
porcelain-furnace as by fire; in the stately vases of Sevres, just
but varied in proportion, unfathomable in the rich depths of their
ground-shadows, and exact and brilliant in the superimposed details;
the more raw but promising efforts of Berlin, marked, like the jewelry
from the same city, by faithful study of Nature; and, blending the
decorative with the economic, the works of the English Wedgwoods and
Mintons, infinite in variety of style and utility, and often pleasing
in design. Italy, though supplying from her ancient stores so many
of the models and so much of the inspiration of the countries named,
seems to have forgotten Faenza and Etruria, and to prefer solid stone
as a material to preparations of clay and flint. Her Venetian glass
has markedly declined, at the same time that glass elsewhere--notably,
the stained windows of Munich and the smaller objects of France
and Bohemia--shows a great advance in perfection of manufacture and
manageability for art purposes.

In that debatable land where the artistic and the convenient meet at
the fire-side and the tea-table, English invention, enterprise
and solicitude for the comfort and presentability of home shone
conspicuous. Domestic art finds in the island a congenial home,
and helps to make one for the islanders. English interiors, often
incongruous and sombre in their decorations, at least produce the
always pleasant sensation of physical comfort, the attainment of
which the average Briton will class among the fine arts. Lovely as the
Graces are, they need a little editing to harmonize them with a coal
fire.

This halfway house of the nineteenth century, the house of glass in
which it boldly ensconced itself to throw stones at its benighted
relations, will ever be a landmark to the traveler over the somewhat
arid expanse of industrial and commercial history. Its humblest
statistics will be preserved, and coming generations will read with
interest that 42,809 persons visited it, on an average, each day, that
these rose on one day to 109,915, and that there were at one time
in the building 93,224, or six thousand more than Domitian's most
tempti