Always the same English method of decoration—­on the one side a park and natural embellishments, which it must be granted, are beautiful and adapted to the climate; on the other, the building, which is a monstrous jumble, wanting in style, and bearing witness not to taste, but to English power.  The interior consists of a museum of antiquities, composed of plaster facsimiles of all the Grecian and Roman statues scattered over Europe; of a museum of the Middle Ages; of a Revival museum; of an Egyptian museum; of a Nineveh museum; of an Indian museum; of a reproduction of a Pompeiian house; of a reproduction of the Alhambra.  The ornaments of the Alhambra have been molded, and these molds are preserved in an adjoining room as proofs of authenticity.  In order to omit nothing, copies have been made of the most notable Italian paintings, and these are daubs worthy of a country fair.

There is a huge tropical hothouse, wherein are fountains, swimming turtles, large aquatic plants in flower, the Sphinx and Egyptian statues sixty feet high, specimens of colossal or rare trees, among others the bark of a Sequoia California 450 feet in height and measuring 116 feet in circumference.  The bark is arranged and fastened to an inner framework in such a manner as to give an idea of the tree itself.  There is a circular concert room, with tiers of benches as in a Colosseum.  Lastly, in the gardens are to be seen life-size reproductions of antediluvian monsters, megatheriums, dinotheriums, and others.  In these gardens Blondin does his tricks at the height of a hundred feet.

I pass over half the things; but does not this conglomeration of odds and ends carry back one’s thoughts to the Rome of Caesar and the Antonines?  At that period also pleasure-palaces were erected for the sovereign people; circuses, theaters, baths wherein were collected statues, paintings, animals, musicians, acrobats, all the treasures and all the oddities of the world; pantheons of opulence and curiosity; genuine bazaars where the liking for what was novel, heterogeneous, and fantastic ousted the feeling of appreciation for simple beauty.

In truth, Rome enriched herself with these things by conquest, England by industry.  Thus it is that at Rome the paintings, the statues, were stolen originals, and the monsters, whether rhinoceroses or lions, were perfectly alive and tore human beings to pieces; whereas here the statues are made of plaster and the monsters of goldbeater’s skin.  The spectacle is one of second class, but of the same kind.  A Greek would not have regarded it with satisfaction; he would have considered it appropriate to powerful barbarians, who, trying to become refined, had utterly failed.

The temple’s gallery of ghosts from Dickens [Footnote:  From “A Pickwickian Pilgrimage.”  The persons mentioned in Mr. Hassard’s Pilgrimage to the Temple and its neighborhood will be recognized as characters In the novels of Charles Dickens.  By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.  Copyright, 1881.]