lxii INTRODUCTION

which comes in this volume next after the National Gallery Letters. As is not uncommonly the case with Ruskin’s works, the title-The Opening of the Crystal Palace-gives no very immediate or obvious indication of its contents. The real subject is a plea for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments; the title tells us only of the occasion which suggested the piece. In June 1854 the newspapers had been full of the new Palace at Sydenham. The Crystal Palace, it may be well to remind the reader, was a later birth of the enthusiasm and ideals which had produced the Great Exhibition of 1851-ideals which Tennyson expressed in a verse which once stood part of his poem “To the Queen”:-

“She brought a vast design to pass,

When Empire and the scattered ends

Of our fierce world did meet as friends

And brethren in her halls of glass.”

To readers of the present day there is perhaps a touch of bathos here; at the time when the lines were written, they appealed to ideas which, originating with the Prince Consort, had penetrated from the Court throughout the country, and taken firm hold of men’s minds. It was thought intolerable that the Great Exhibition should pass away as though it had never been. It was decided therefore to construct out of its materials a permanent Hall of Glass which should continue and extend the educational and artistic influence of the Exhibition. The Palace was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, and was opened by the Queen and the Prince Consort in state on June 10, 1854. Ruskin, as appears from this pamphlet, and from passages in his other writings, shared to the full the high and generous hopes with which the Palace was started upon its chequered career. “It is impossible,” he says, “to estimate the influence of such an institution on the minds of the working classes” (p. 418); and, as we have already seen, he took particular interest in a collection of casts of sculpture and architecture which had been made for exhibition in the Palace (Vol. X. pp. 114, 416). But in the pćans of popular enthusiasm which saw, in the Exhibition and the Palace, the birth of a new Order of Architecture, as well as the dawn of a New Era, Ruskin could have no sympathy whatever. We have seen already, in an appendix to the first volume of The Stones of Venice, his protest against the notion that the construction of a greenhouse “larger than ever greenhouse was built before” had any artistic significance, however great its mechanical ingenuity might be (Vol. IX. pp. 455-456). We shall meet with the same protest in a later work, where this so-called “edifice of Fairyland” is faithfully dealt

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