Page:Letters from England.djvu/69

 The Palace of Engineering is magnificent; and the finest works of English plastic art are locomotives, ships, boilers, turbines, transformers, queer machines with two horns at the top, machines for all sorts of rotating, shaking and banging, monsters far more fantastic and infinitely more elegant than the primeval lizards in the Natural History Museum. I do not know what they are called and what they are used for, but they are superb, and sometimes a mere screw matrix (a hundred pounds in weight) is the highest pitch of formal perfection. Some machines are red like paprika, others massive and grey, some burnished with brass and others black and tremendous like a tomb, and it is odd that an age which has devised two pillars and seven steps in front of every house, should have composed in metal such inexhaustible wonders and beauties of forms and functions. And now, just imagine that this is crammed together on an area larger than the Vaclav Square, that it is larger than the Uffizi and the Vatican collections put Rh