with decorations looking like bars of music, are
a couple of uncompromising spirit-stands, with
bottles of very comfortable dimensions duly
labelled. It almost reconciles one to this absurd
court, to see gleaming in the corner among all
sorts of strange and uncouth matters, the prosaic
word "Rum."

Nearly every part of that Exhibition is
devoted to progress. "See how we advance" is
the cry. But here, as in those pictures by the
Belgian Leys, the boast is rather "see how we
go back. You are almost as badly off as the
people of the sixteenth century." Wicked is
the word for this. For a man with the glorious
light of this age around him to labour day after
day at pictures such as those is really wicked.
Fancy any one getting up in the morning, and
receiving his letter by the post, or haply a
telegram fresh from the wires, and then going
into his studio to try and force his mind back
into a fit state to reproduce the infantine
conceits of four centuries ago!

But, after all, we need not be very angry.
This little court and these few pictures form
but a very small portion of the great and goodly
show, and in every other part of the building
"Onward" is the motto of the workman.
Not in unintelligible characters, not in Gothic
letters that one cannot read, but in types to be
understood by every passer-by.

It is not necessary to examine every yard of
material, or every piece of china or hardware
exhibited, in order to get to the conclusion that
taste has made and is making, great and steady
advances. The immense contrast, again,
between the taste shown among the civilised
nations, even when it is good, and that displayed
by what are sometimes called the uncivilised,
may be estimated without a deliberate study of
every yard of Eastern carpet, or every Chinese
jar in the building. It is extraordinary to see
how far the uncivilised people are beyond the
civilised, in many matters of taste, and more
especially in choice and brilliancy of colour.
We finish neatly; we now, at any rate for the
most part, combine colours harmoniously, but all
we do is so small, so timid. It is a thing of rules
and laid-down laws, and there is no hope of its
being otherwise. The barbarous peoples in all
matters of design have genius, and genius is
audacious. Where there is no genius, there
is, and should be, timidity. When we are
not timid, but force a courage in design for
which there is no groundwork of innate power,
we become simply vulgar. To be neat, to be
harmonious, pretty, highly finished, is all we
can at present attempt, and even of this the
results are often most charming. But the lavish,
reckless splendour of uncivilised design is
beyond us altogether.

It is difficult not to be lured away thus from
time to time into criticisms on the separate
objects exhibited in this great Bazaar, but such
criticism is only parenthetical, and is not the
distinct function of the Registrar-General.
What that officer has undertaken is to show
wherein the greatness of this age chiefly lies, and
what particular phase in the history of our
development we have reached.

We must look westward. The rising power
of the age, its life, its natural development, the
touch to which most natures of the present day
respond, comes from that long low shed which is
called the Western Annexe. Thither let us bend
our steps.

If "Onward" be the motto throughout the
great building, it is pre-eminently and above all
the motto of the Western Annexe. As one
passes that portion of the Exhibition edifice, even
outside the walls, what a busy noise of rattling
machinery comes from within. Progress enough
here. Progress of thousand-horse power. One
seems to hear the clatter of their hoofs. What
proclamation of present strength, what promise
of future achievement, in every wheel and piston-rod
working under that roof. The wonders
already performed are great, but who shall say
what greater marvels are in store.

Even the people we meet in the Western
Annexe, who are in any sort mixed up with the
arts illustrated there, seem to wear a different
aspect from other men. They look so strong,
so prosperous, so alive. Confident as to the
value of their work, conscious that the world
cannot do without them, with the world on
their side, understood by the men of their
time, they work with courage and thrive. These
are different men from the poet, the sculptor,
the painter, whose lives are passed (unless they
are very sorry performers indeed) in such
misgivings as must attend the work of men who
deal with Fancies in an age of Facts.

And who shall say that this age of machinery
and steel is without its appeal to the imagination
and to our sense of the beautiful? The engine
that slowly year by year eats its way through
the Alps, and will at last drill the Mont Cenis
through, as a needle's eye is drilled, makes surely
some appeal to fancy as it struggles with the
most stubborn of the elements. To the fancy
also appeals in a widely different way, that
wondrous mechanism which almost seems to have
a power of thought, and by which these very
words might, in an incredibly short time, be fixed
in print.

On the principle of selecting one or two things
the most marked of their kind as illustrations of
the class to which they belong, it may be admissible
to register here in half a dozen words the
existence of a machine which, though perhaps
not more ingenious than some others, appeals
more strongly than the rest to the intellectual
faculty. The new machine for setting manuscript
up in print, and for putting the letters back in their
places alphabetically after they are done with, is
a machine that may almost be said to think. At
first one cannot understand how that, last
achievement, which implies selection, can be executed
without thought. But thus it is: The compositor
sits before an instrument with keys like
those of a piano, on each of which is inscribed
a letter or a mark of punctuation—comma,
semicolon, note of interrogation. In combination
with these keys are a set of tubes, each