The bewildered engineer was on the point of
closing with several of these offers, when the
project was revived of a second International
Exhibition. An offer was made in the lump for
the whole structure, and joyfully accepted; but
an objection was raised by the exhibition
managers to the very practical character of the
architecture. The engineer was so delighted at
securing such excellent tenants that he at once
devised a daring method of removing this objection.
He planned two monster domes, which
cost about thirty thousand pounds apiece, and
these he placed in such a position at each end
of the hardware cathedral that at most interior
points they could not be seen at all, and at only
one point could they both be seen together.
Consequently, this sixty thousand pounds,
invested in iron and glass, was behind a screen
three-fourths of its time, and, when it peeped
out, only one half of its value was generally
visible. The ingenuity of this arrangement,
elaborately devised to swallow up money and
show little or nothing for it, was so apparent to
the meanest capacity, that no one ever accused
the building, after this, of being too practical.

PIERRE GRINGOIRE'S MIRROR.

ONCE upon a time—nearly three hundred and
fifty years ago—there was a preacher who said
to himself, "Others may have the doctrine, but
I have the manner. I have the real turn of the
wrist; the exact modulation which insinuates all
that I teach infallibly into the hearer's mind."
One Sunday afternoon the Thespis of the
market-place, Master Jean du Pontalais, marching
his gay theatrical troop through the street,
drew up in a crossway under the windows of
the church where this preacher was at work, and
ordered his tambourine to play, for he desired
to draw out the congregation and carry them
away with him into the market-place, where he
had set up his platform. The more noise the
tambourine made, the more the preacher shouted.
The contest became furious. At last the preacher
cried, "Let somebody go out and stop that
tambourine!" Several went out, but not to stop the
tambourine. "Then," said the preacher, "truly
I will go myself. Let nobody stir. I shall be
back immediately." Going out into the crossway,
furious with rage, he cried to the mummer,
"Hallo! what has made you so bold as to play
your tambourine when I am preaching?"
Pontalais looked at him, and said, "Hallo! what
has made you so bold as to preach when I am
playing on my tambourine?" The preacher,
taking a knife from his man, cut a great gash in
the tambourine and stopped its music, then
returned into the church to end his sermon. But
Pontalais, going behind, slily fitted the gash in
the tambourine to the preacher's head, so that
he wore it, unconsciously, like an Albanian hat
when he remounted his chair; and as he urged the
wrong that had been done him, everybody laughed.
That story is told in an anecdote book by a
chamberlain to Margaret of Navarre, sister to
Francis the First of France; and it represents a
not uncommon contest in the France of that day
between the player and the churchman.

We do not now hear for the first time of a
Pope who is troubled, and a cause of trouble
through the struggle to hold in the same hand
temporal and spiritual authority. There was
such a Pope—Julius the Second—in the days
of Pontalais; he was opposed, not abetted by the
government of France, and it is curious to
see how he was dealt with in the market-place
by the old French Aristophanes, Pierre
Gringoire—the most famous of the old writers of
Follies and Farces, which in the days of Louis the
Twelfth and of Francis the First, his successor,
held the mirror up to life, and were often applied
as closely to the service of politics as the mystery
plays to the services of religion.

Pierre Gringoire began to write, as a young
man of about five-and-twenty, at the beginning
of the sixteenth century. Between gross abuse
and affected worship women lost the due honour
of men in the old days of chivalry, talk as we
may about their poetical delicacy. Termagant
wives were a stock-subject of the early farces.
One such woman, says a farce, having married
her lover on written conditions that he should
make beds, cook, clean, fetch, and carry, kept
the husband to his bond, till finding himself
a slave, he tilted her into the great tub on a
washing-day. All her entreaties to be helped
out are answered by the objection that no
such duty is written in the bond. Her
mother coming in, when she is at the last gasp,
saves her, and she becomes a better wife for her
experience. Somewhat thus ran the doggrel
dialogue between the wife in the tub and her
Shylock of a spouse:

SHE.      My good husband, save me, pray,
              I'm already fainting away;
              Put your hand in just a little bit.
HE.        ln my paper that was never writ.
              Down, down, down she must go.
SHE.      Ah, ah! Can you leave me so?
              Help me at once or I'm dead.
HE.        "—You'll bolt the meal and bake the
                     bread,
              Heat the oven and wash the linen—"
SHE.      Now the chill of the blood's beginning;
              A moment more and I die.
              Save me! O, why don't you try?
HE.        "—Wash the linen, cook the food—"
SHE.     Only a hand, do be so good!
HE.       "—Carry the grist up the hill to the
                    mill—"
SHE.    You're a beast of a cur! I shrivel! I
                    chill!
HE.      "—Make the beds the moment you're
                     drest—"
SHE.    Ah! you make my peril a jest!
HE.      "—Then go down and put on the pot—"
SHE.    Alas, where is my mother, Lolotte!
HE.      "—And sweep the kitchen and keep it
                   neat."
SHE.   Go fetch the parson to me, I entreat!
HE.      I've read the whole of the articles through,
            But tell you without any more ado,
            This duty was never set down by you.
            Save yourself as well as you're able,
            My duty now, is to rub the table.