Page:Once a Week Dec 1861 to June 1862.pdf/579

17, 1862.] We are told, indeed, in a spirit of brag, strangely American in its taste, that the two domes are the largest in Europe, as though a work of art were to be estimated by its size, like some Yankee panorama. If Captain Fowke has succeeded in raising the largest dome yet erected, we cannot congratulate him on his work. It is generally considered a triumph of art to increase the apparent size of a building, but it is certain that the domes of the Great Exhibition, by a want of artistic arrangement, are so dwarfed as to lose their claim to height. Let us for a moment compare them with the work of Wren. The dome of St. Paul's is much smaller, but it absolutely looks a mountain to the transparent structures, which appear like two Nassau balloons rising over the buildings of the South Kensington Museum. The reason is obvious: the form is a little better than half a sphere, instead of the elliptical curve which greets the eye of the delighted spectator as he goes up Ludgate Hill. What are we to say, again, to the miserable base of painted boards from which the dome springs?—a straight line, so poverty-stricken in look, that we cannot help comparing the whole structure to an egg and its cup. Wren added to the height of his dome, by placing it on an enriched pedestal, which added to the grandeur of its form; and the dome of the Radcliffe Library at Oxford was buttressed with scrolls with the like impressive result.

But we must object in toto to the introduction of glass domes as a feature of architecture—at least when viewed from the exterior. Their transparency entirely deprives them of the preponderating size which solid domes exhibit, and which always forms a grand feature—generally the leading one—in the public buildings of Europe so enriched. Moreover, the form itself, however beautiful its outline may be when of glass, is entirely cut up by the manner in which the supporting ribs cut each other. If we judge of them from the inside less is to be said against them; but our praise even here can only be negative, as without doubt they let in a vast deal more light than is necessary, whilst they utterly fail to transmit light to the tunnel-like nave. We confess we would much rather have seen such a dome as that covering the reading-room of the British Museum, where there is light enough in all conscience, notwithstanding the massiveness of its exterior. But the truly ludicrous appearance of the dome of the Great Exhibition, as seen from the only part the public can approach it on the eastern side, is fairly given in the following sketch which was made from the Exhibition road opposite to the eastern entrance, and at the utmost distance the artist could get from the object. Here it puts on the appearance of one of those umbrellas used to protect the vegetables in Covent Garden Market. Viewed from the Horticultural Gardens, the best view can perhaps be had of those enormous wens upon the ugly body of the building, but we conceive that as the two are brought into view from this point, the faults of the building are thereby only doubled. It will be unnecessary to dilate upon the poverty-stricken look of the great wheel