The English probably eat with more simple enjoyment than any other
people; not ravenously, as we often do, and not exquisitely and
artificially, like the French, but deliberately and vigorously, and with
due absorption in the business, so that nothing good is lost upon
them. . . . . It is remarkable how large a feature the refreshment-rooms
make in the arrangements of the Crystal Palace.
The Crystal Palace is a gigantic toy for the English people to play with.
The design seems to be to reproduce all past ages, by representing the
features of their interior architecture, costume, religion, domestic
life, and everything that can be expressed by paint and plaster; and,
likewise, to bring all climates and regions of the earth within these
enchanted precincts, with their inhabitants and animals in living
semblance, and their vegetable productions, as far as possible, alive and
real. Some part of the design is already accomplished to a wonderful
degree. The Indian, the Egyptian, and especially the Arabian, courts are
admirably executed. I never saw or conceived anything so gorgeous as the
Alhambra. There are Byzantine and mediaeval representations, too,--
reproductions of ancient apartments, decorations, statues from tombs,
monuments, religious and funereal,--that gave me new ideas of what
antiquity has been. It takes down one's overweening opinion of the
present time, to see how many kinds of beauty and magnificence have
heretofore existed, and are now quite passed away and forgotten; and to
find that we, who suppose that, in all matters of taste, our age is the
very flower-season of the time,--that we are poor and meagre as to many
things in which they were rich.
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