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SHALL THE CRYSTAL PALACE STAND?

ARE we to take to ourselves the closing ceremonies of the Exhibition
as sad, dull presages of the doom of the wondrous fabric itself—a doom
resolved upon, and relentlessly pursued by the stern wisdom of the great
PAN of the Woods and Forests? If so, most pertinently, most admirably, were those ceremonies ordered for the very genius of dumpisbness1
of sullen wilfulness, presided on the Saturday, and on the float
Wednesday. Not a man appeared in the lack-a-daisical pageant, not one,
from the Prince to the Bishop, but dulness marked him for her own.
Authority seemed to be remorseful of the jocund bearing held on the
st of May Land therefore did a sort of dropjaw penance on the 15th of
October. 1-inmdrum was paramount! And the skies sympathised
with human gloom, making all as dim and comfortless without the
crystal walls, as authority was dark and glumpy within. A loyal superstition attributed the wet and murky weather to the absence of the
QUEEN. Had she graced the pageant, all would have been light sad
debonnaire; HER MAJESTY, according to the cheerful faith, being a
concentration of sunbeams.
But the fact is now unalterable; and let us, as sober, melancholy mind-the-main-chance Britons, rejoice thereupon. We have redeemed our character—our inalienable right—of dulness. If we did let loose somewhat in unseemly gaiety on the 1st of May; have we not recovered ourselves in the substantial stupidity of the 15th of October? If we did mum and flaunt it in the spring, to the astonishment of the stranger— who wondered much at jocund Bunn !—have we not returned to our national sackcloth, our characteristic ashes, in autumn? Yes; we hope we have redeemed ourselves in the doubtful opinion of the foreigner. We have every faith that the stranger will depart from our shores with the strengthened conviction, that when JOHN BULL in authority makes up his mind to be freezingly cold, and substantially sullen, he may triumphantly compete with all the human race. There was, as the closing ceremonial was acted, one prize medal wanting. A medal, with a whole pig of lead in it—for the dumps. And this medal—who can doubt it?
—must have been carried off by the Royal Commission.
And yet there may have been a kindness intended in the gloom of the ceremony: benevolence may have lurked in the doldrums of authority. The utter blankness of meaning with which the Exhibition was declared at an end, may have been studiously, yet, withal, tenderly affected to prepare us for the grand consummation of the moot profound, the most triumphant, and most barbarous stupidity (spiced somewhat with wickedness), that ever made ape kind gape at mankind;
—to wit, the destruction of the last wonder of the world, the marvellous fabric that, at a glance, has won the homage of millions.
Not that the sensibility, masked in coldness, of authority, was all undignified by a high, patrician philosophy; a stoicism that would see the crystal wonder break into nothing, like a prismatic soap-bubble. Not, moreover, that LORD SEYMOUR is to be thought the great original of official insensibility: oh, no— “Ere wild in Woods that noble savage ran,”— we had many and many high examples of the rabid contempt of office
for the wishes and sympathies of the people. LORD SEYMOUR, able is he is in his way, is only a large contributor, not an originator. How. ever, when the Palace shall have passed away, we trust that among the statues to be raised to commemorate its once whereabout, there will he some effigy to eternize the condescension and urbanity radiant in the head Minister of Woods and Forests for 1851. May we propose a statue of—The Snarling Faun?
However, taking it as foolishly and wickedly determined by authority
—and no less stupidly and criminally granted and accepted by the country—that the wondrous fabric shall be broken up, having served its turn, like a child’s money-box—how about the reward for the inventor of the new marvel? Great was the perplexity of the Royal Commission, blinded and smothered by visions of bricks and mortar—no more to be got together by the appointed time than the final bricks of Babel— when JOSEPH PAXTON shot like a sunbeam upon the darkened council. An outrolling of a sheet of paper—a few master words—and JOSEPH PAXTON became the deliverer of his Prince and his Prince’s Magi from difficulties that threatened to be inextricable—making for himself a world-wide renown, and leaving his name, “like a wild-flower to his land.”
Well, JOSEPH PAXTON, at this writing, has been offered knighthood. What beside? Knighthood may or may not be a valuable nominal property: the word—the sound—takes its worth from the estimation of its bearer. Some men may make no more account of such title than of the jingling of pebbles in a tin-pot: others may consider it still to vibrate with ravishing music.
But knighthood—mere knighthood! Have we not accidental knights
—knights of good luck? Royalty goes into the City; and, In! by virtue of that happy incident, two aldermen blow into knights. “Wings at our shoulders seem to play!” On a sudden, spurs jingle at our civic heels, delighting our civic ears.
Majesty makes a progress, in pelting shower, visiting Liverpool, and
—for the time—sunny Manchester. And a bran fire-new knight presses the Liverpool bolster—a knight, of newest print, is stamped upon the cotton city. And it may be well, with our institutions, that this should be. Where the Queen of Beauty set her foot, flowers sprang at the touch; where QUEEN VlcToluA travels, let honours blossom. But these are honours of ceremony—Court Circular glories—hardly of marked account, when vouchsafed upon men whose official life is not an accident; but whose position in the eye of mankind has been won by the inspiration and the labour of their souls. Surely, the case of JOSEPH PAXTON is a case of “Genius versus Mayors and Aldermen.”
All dues paid, the Exhibition Commission are encumbered with a quarter of a million of money. How much of this is owing to the felicitous genius, inspired at the happiest moment, of JOSEPH PAXTON? Beautiful as were the contents of the glass, the glass itself was the prime glory; bearing the same relation to the things it covered, as does the shell 
“— that lustre has imbibed
In the sun’s palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands mid-way in the wave,”
to the fish within it. Of the millions of visitors to the Exhibition, how many came to the sight, brought thither by ‘what they had heard and read of the wonderful Crystal Palace? That Palace, dimly shown in pictures—darkly outlined in printers’ ink? Displace that beautiful fabric from the mind, and in its stead place the brick-and-mortar mountain that was to have been—granting it could have been pited by the 1st of May—and bow many tens of thousands may he deducted from the millions of pilgrims who for the past five months have thronged our streets wending to Hyde Park; there, at one glance, to acknowledge a wonder of beauty that seemed to realise the fiction of fairy-land: a structure raised rather by the genii of SINDBAD, than the materialised thought of human genius?
Why, the CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER is, in his pride of office, a smiling debtor to JOSEPH PAXTON. Run through the items of the increasing revenue—as last made up—and the fiscal influence of the Crystal Palace brightens in almost every numeral. All folks with commodities to sell—or sights to show—whatever was the lull for the month of May— have reaped a ten-fold harvest. There can be no sulky denial of this truth; the Exchequer possesses proof of it—playhouse managers in thankful closing speeches, confess it. But leaving all this profit apart, come we to the hard, glittering fact of a quarter of a million made beneath the roof of the Crystal Palace.
What, then, for the architect? Mere knighthood? Court gingerbread, with no gilding? This will never do. Some am all percentage from that quarter of a million is as much the due of JOSEPH PAXTON as was his day’s wage to any JOSEPH the glazier who worked at the fabric. All England must grant this truth; and to the will of England to insist upon its application, we hopefully leave it.
Finally, shall the Crystal Palace stand?
This is a question to be answered, once and for all, by the people. A. certain knot of the aristocracy, strong in their faith of official sympathy towards all that is exclusive, all that is contemptuous of the masses, already rejoice in the certainty of the demolition of the five months’ wonder of the world. If the people do not speak with one loud, unstammering voice, LORD SEYMOUR and his merry men will lush to the destruction; jolly, and full-blooded as the Goths rushed into Rome. And they will do Goths’ work, to the disgrace of England, and the scorn and the amazement of the nations; if the voice of the country do not with one acclaim cry,— “HOLD”