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of columns and girders are advanced eight feet into the nave at every seventy-two feet. An arched roof covers the nave, and the centre transept towers into the air in fairy-like lightness and brilliancy. There are also recesses twenty-four feet deep in the garden fronts of all the transepts, which throw fine shadows, and relieve the continuous surface of the plain glass walls; and the whole building is otherwise agreeably broken

into parts by the low square towers at the junction of the nave and transepts, the open galleries toward the garden front, and the long wings on either side. The building is heated to the genial temperature of Madeira, by an elaborate system of hotwater pipes, and the supply of water is drawn from an Artesian well. The Tropical Department, once a great feature of the Palace, has ceased to exist; having been destroyed by fire about three years ago.

There are large and beautiful pleasure grounds all around the Crystal Palace, and all the great national fetes, concerts,

and open air demonstrations, take place here. Patti, Nillson, and Sims Reeves, sing here in benefits for charitable associations, and for a shilling, a person may listen to ballads on Saturday afternoons, at these concerts, sung by the greatest living English tenor. Then there are acres of restaurants and dining saloons inside and outside of the Crystal Palace, and apparatus and cooking utensils are on the premises, whereby ten thousand people may find dinner, all at one time, and sit down to tables in five minutes after dinner has been ordered. During the long summer evenings, promenade concerts are held at the Crystal Palace, and fire-works are let off in the presence of great crowds, who enjoy the sports and junketings much as a New York crowd may do on a Fourth of July night, in the City Hall, or Madison Park.

The contents of the Palace itself are calculated to puzzle the brains of a philosopher. Everything wonderful, curious, precious, or difficult to find at any other other place, may be found at the Crystal Palace.

Specimens of architecture, sculpture of all ages, tombs, tem-ples, busts, statues, capitals, hieroglyphs, from Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Italy, portions and entire courts from the glorious Alhambra, gigantic relics and ruins from the Palaces of Babylon, Susa, and Nineveh; fragments of the Christian temples of Italy, the castles and churches of Germany, the Chateaux of Belgium and France, and the Cathedrals and Mansions of England, from the earliest ages to the present time, all of which are arranged in "courts" in the most systematic order.

Beside these there are many Industrial "Courts" containing the most wonderful and useful inventions of the genius and scholar. Then there are gigantic models of the tremendous animals who existed before the flood, with models of huge and hideous reptiles, and saurians, who did their level best in the same period.

Some sunny Saturdays as many as fifty thousand people pay visits to the Crystal Palace, and to see and enjoy all these wor

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ders, the charge is only one shilling, including concerts, music, fire-works, and flirtations.

The last time I was there it was on the occasion of the Royal Dramatic Fete, for the benefit of the profession, and fully a hundred thousand persons were present, including the Prince and Princess of Wales, and many of the nobility.

The entire cost of grounds and building, with works of art and curiosities, was seven million dollars. There were 15,000,000 of bricks, 6,000 tons of iron, 20,000 loads of timber, 300,000 superficial feet of glass, 1,200 iron columns, one mile and a half of clerstory windows, and other materials in proportion, used in the construction of the edifice, and the space of ground enclosed under the transparent roof is twenty-five acres, being one-fifth greater than the area of the base of the Great Pyramid.

CHAPTER XVI.

ARISTOCRATIC DISSIPATION.

NGLAND has been singularly unfortunate in her Royal Families.

York and Lancaster, Plantagenet and Tudor, Stuarts or Hanoverians, they have been, with here and there an odd exception, a very bad lot, morally speaking.

It is a curious history of crime and bloodshed, of dishonor, perjury, and harlotry, this history of the Monarchs of England, since the days of William the Norman, who had three illegitimate children, and massacred thousands of his Saxon subjects every year, down to the days of George IV, the most gentlemanly blackguard of his time and of Europe.

Roll back the hoary gates of the past, and look at Richard Crookback, who reveled in blood, and died in Bosworth Ditch, a death only a little better than that of Edward IV, whose children Richard basely murdered, and we find succeeding him a scoundrel like the Eighth Henry, a brutal fiend, with his six successive wives, all of whom perished miserably, but the first and last wives, Catharine of Arragon and Catharine Parr; and then we find his two children-Mary, an honest fanatic, burning human beings for the honor of God; and next comes Elizabeth, who has been facetiously styled the Virgin Queenwith her paramours and favorites. Follow this hideous old spinster to the yawning verge of the tomb, and she is still to be seen with her parchment visage and grey hairs, seeking new

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lovers, or butchering the unfortunate Queen of Scots, until at last the dread moment of all approaches, when she tells her horrified chaplain that she will give millions of money for a moment of time. Then we have a pusillanimous monarch, James I, who spends his best years discovering witches and writing fantastical and forgotten treatises against tobacco, or permitting a man like Bacon-whose life was worth that of a thousand Kings, to be degraded and made miserable, till at last his great, far seeing eyes are closed in a final sleep-his heart having broken to pieces in the meridian of his genius.

Then comes Charles I, a good man in his mild way, a patron of the arts, a good husband and father, but withal he is doomed to the block.

Vainly he endeavors, in battle and statecraft, to stem the onward march of the people who are determined to hurl all obstacles from their path which stand in the way of their new ideas.

And now comes up the Brewer, Oliver Cromwell, one of Carlyle's heroes, (and by the way, all of Carlyle's heroes are dripping with blood,) a most accomplished and unrelenting butcher, one who thanks God for his "precious mercies" when a thousand men, women, and children are driven over a bridge into a deep river beneath, impelled by the pikes of his ruffianly soldiery. Then he dies, and Charles II, a dissolute royal scamp succeeds, and he of course has to dig up the crumbling skeleton of Cromwell to hang it on Tyburn tree, that all men may see what manner of divinity it is that should hedge around a King.

Think of this royal vagabond, who has for his mistress a Stewart, a Duchess of Cleveland, a Louise de Queroailles, who also becomes a Duchess of Portsmouth, and last but not least, poor simple, soft-hearted Mistress Nelly Gwynne, who left to the nation Greenwich Hospital to atone for her lost soul.

It might be expected that in these days of the daily newspapers and telegraph wires, of railroads, female suffrage and personal journalism, that royalty, and notably, English royalty,