Page:Once a Week Dec 1861 to June 1862.pdf/580

17, 1862.] 



 over the eastern and western entrances. Of the interior of the building not much is to be said, except that it entirely lacks that unity of design which characterised the Crystal Palace of 1851. On every hand we are hemmed in by walls of uncouth brickwork, and where a beautiful effect was possible, such as openings towards the north, giving occasional peeps of the Horticultural Gardens which lie in the arms of the building, the dull brick-wall rises and shuts us out. From the upper gallery of the nave a charming vista might thus have been produced; but the inherent sense of the ugly, which manifestly oppresses Captain Fowke, leads him instead to the following composition of window and stairs, which cannot be matched for hideousness, we venture to say, by any Birmingham manufactory.

The building has certain points about it which renders it, on the whole, a better packing-case for holding the riches it contains than the building of 1851. To begin: it is larger than its predecessor, the covered space in that Exhibition occupying seven hundred and ninety-nine thousand feet, and the present building nine hundred and eighty-eight thousand feet. If we consider the area of covered space it contains, it is also larger than the Paris Exhibition of 1855. It has this advantage also over the last building,—the machinery-department is contained in the western annexe, instead of in the