and Horace Vernet, and as many Englishmen at Paris for the first time came face to face with the canvases of Rosa Bonheur, Corot, Daubigny, Millet, Delacroix, Gustave Doré, Edouard Frère, Gérôme, Meissonier, Robert Fleury, Troyon, Knaus, Tidemand, Madrazo, Verboeckhoven, Baron Leys, and many others whose names are now "household words;" so the English gallery was a revelation to Frenchmen, extorting from one of their greatest critics, Théophile Gautier, the admission, "The English School is original, original as the people that produced it.” Before proceeding further it may be well to note that in 1854 Victoria held its first Exhibition at Melbourne, in a palace of glass erected on the site of the present Mint, a subsequent Exhibition being held in the same building in '61; the Intercolonial display of '66-'67 taking place in a building intended to serve as a Public Library, which has been added to at the succeeding Exhibitions of '72-73, preparatory to the Vienna Exhibition, and that of the past year, Intercolonial also, the Colonial rehearsal of the coming drama. Passing on through the local industrial celebrations at Brussels in '56, Lausanne in '57, with 2,050 exhibitors, Turin in '58, and Hanover in '59, it is well to halt for a brief while at '57 and recall the unequalled Fine Art Exhibition at Manchester. Never before or since has such a mass of artistic wealth, both of old masters and the modern school, been congregated together; art indeed was everywhere prominent, even in the arrangement of the great hall with its statues and groups of armour, separated and set in little islands of greenery. Heirlooms were contributed from all parts of the kingdom; the Royal Academy sent its diploma pictures, and to the zeal and industry of Peter Cunningham is due the germ of a British Portrait Gallery, running through our British worthies from Henry IV. to Keats, and enriched with the works of Holbein, Van Dyck, Zucchero, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Not only artistically but financially was it a success, and Manchester may well be proud of the fact that the admissions reached a total of no less than 1,336,715, the total receipts being 83,520.; the figures tell their own tale. Greece in '59 not only revived the Olympic games-" We have the Pyrrhic dance as yet, where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone," but also inaugurated her first Exhibition at Athens with the creditable number of 947 exhibitors. 1860 was a very remarkable year, for nowhere, even in the realms of Prester John, the principality of Monaco, or the kingdom of the Grand Lama of Thibet, can 36714. E the smallest trace of an Exhibition be found. Yet not so; even the consolation of proving the rule by the exception is denied to the searcher after truth. Stockholm in this year had its Exhibition, the number of exhibitors being 200. 1861, however, made amends; Dublin had its Art Exhibition, Edinburgh its Exhibition of Art Treasures, and Italy its first National Italian display at Florence. This last demonstration had its locale in a building skilfully adapted for the purpose; formerly a railway station built from the designs of the younger Brunel, assisted by Mr. T. H. Wyatt, it was so contrived that the industrial section occupied the ground floor, whilst the upper story was set apart for the Art Exposition; machinery, agriculture, and zoology having each its separate edifice. Overshadowed by the loss the nation sustained on the sad 14th of December '61, the Great International Exhibition at London in 1862 had to struggle against the absence of Court ceremonials, and to rely for success solely on intrinsic merits. The building of brick, unornate, not to say plain, was externally distinguished by two domes, one on the axis of each transept. These domes, composed of iron and glass, rose to a height of 200 feet, were crowned by ornamental finials 55 feet high, and had each a diameter of 160 feet. The main building was a parallelogram, about 1,150 feet long by 560 wide, and the total area roofed in was 988,000 square feet, the total space covered and uncovered amounting to no less than 1,231,000, and the total cost some 460,000l. The domes and the Picture Galleries were the great successes of the designer, Captain Fowke, and the erection of the former by Messrs. Kelk and Lucas was a triumph of engineering skill. In the industrial and machinery sections the progress was marked in every branch, but it was in the department of Fine Arts that the '62 Exhibition stood preeminent. Here not only was Continental Art fully displayed, but here may the glories of English Art be said to have culminated, that unrivalled collection being almost exhaustive, giving us works well known from engravings, but many of which as paintings had, up to that time, been sealed books, kept under the guardianship of lock and key in Royal and Ducal galleries, and here for the first time thrown open to the world's gaze. Here were Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Wilkie, and a goodly company of those great masters of British Art who had passed away, with those giants of the palette, Maclise, Mulready, Clarkson Stanfield, Sir Edwin Landseer, and David Roberts, who have since been taken from us. 30,000 people assisted at the opening by the Duke of Cambridge; 2,000 choristers and 400 musicians gave effect to the setting by Sir Sterndale Bennett of the Poet Laureate's ode, and the effect, both of sight and sound, was one of unsurpassed magnificence. Other Exhibitions had been noted for the absence of those slaves to the "leaden messengers, that ride upon the violent speed of fire," but here, in Tennyson's words— Were trophies brought from every main, and it would seem impossible to say whether the doors of the Temple of Janus would open wide or remain for ever closed. The Exhibition opened on the 1st of May, a notable feature on that day being the presence of the Japanese Ambassadors, and closed on the 15th November, being a total of 171 days. The amount received was 408,5301. 1s. 8d., and the number of visitors 6,211,103, the maximum being attained on Thursday, October 30th, with 67,891. 1863 can count but two Exhibitions, one for the Duchy of Nassau at Wiesbaden, the number of exhibitors being no less than 1,317, and Constantinople with its exposition, comprising the natural and industrial resources of the empire. In 1864 the "Merseburg "Industrial Exposition was held, taking in Saxony, Hanover, Weimar, and Eisenach, Gotha, Anhalt, Meiningen, Schwarzburg, Sonderhausen, and Rudolphstadt, and thus constituting itself a German Exhibition. 1865 saw many varied gatherings, all International, that of Amsterdam being devoted to flowers, at which, strange to say, neither black tulip, blue dahlia, or green rose, put in a claim for the Grand Medal of Honour, Paris, calling a cheese conference, at which Stilton, Cheddar, Glo'ster, Gruyère, Brie, Roquefort, Bondon, evil-smelling Limberger, Liptauer, Schapziger, Parmesan, Gorgonzola, Ementhaler, and Gouda stood forth as the representatives of casein; whilst the displays of Dublin, Oporto (3,911 exhibitors), and Stettin (1,451 exhibitors) appealed to the general mass of industries. The Dublin Exhibition of 1865, like that of '53, owed much to the liberality of a citizen, the munificent donor on this occasion being the late Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness. The building, a gossamer-like structure of iron and glass, was opened on the 9th of May by the Prince of Wales in the presence of some 10,000 spectators, and was closed on that day six months, having been open 159 days and 51 evenings, the total number of admissions, exceeding 900,000, being an average of 5,000 by day and 3,000 by night. The Dublin Exhibition of '65 did not belie the reputation it had gained in '53, and many of the works of art then exhibited, both paintings and statues, were retained to adorn this country. The Sculpture Gallery will, like the Roman Court in '62, long remain a pleasant memory for those fortunate enough to have seen them. Philadelphia, it may be also noted in '65, convened manufacturers from all parts of the United States. The Scandinavian Exhibition of '66 has been already spoken of, and it may be here mentioned that the Empire of the Brazils had in this year an exhibition of raw products at Rio Janeiro, comprehending 2,374 exhibitors. Between the Avenue de la Bourdonnaye and the Avenue Suffren, on an historic site, stood in 1867 the edifice denominated by the Emperor Napoleon as a "magnificent gasometer." To Prince Napoleon is due the conception of the idea, and the words of the Imperial Commission fully describe it “An "area with two main entrances, manufactures, and products of cognate natures, "to be arranged in concentric bands, with a garden in the middle. The "different nationalties to intersect the bands by transepts or avenues 66 radiating from the centre." Admirable in theory, you passed down one of the spokes of this monster wheel, and you saw all that the country had to show; you went round an ellipse, and the relative qualities of similar productions in various lands were all presented. But as all "nations need what other lands produce" so the displays were irregular, and the theory fell to the ground. The external ring of the building was devoted to machinery, the internal to the "History of Labour," beginning with Gaul before the use of metals, and ranging through the first and second epochs of caves, the age of stone, the age of transition and of lacustrine dwellings, free Gaul, and Gaul under the Romans, the days of Charlemagne and of the Carlovingian Kings, the Moyen-Age, the Renaissance, and all the changing fashions at home and abroad down to the commencement of the last century-a magnificent idea in truth, and superbly carried out. Indeed in every sense was the Exhibition of '67 a marvellous spectacle, with its park studded with mosques, Russian "slobodas," Swiss châlets, Tunisian kiosks, Swedish cottages, English lighthouses, Egyptian palaces, (with a Museum of Egyptiology arranged by Mariette Bey,) stables for dromedaries, a temple, and an "okel" or caravanserai, all massed in picturesque confusion. One feature of the Exhibition was the engineering triumph of the age and of M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the model of the Suez Canal, with its navy of dredges, steamers, and boats. All this shown to the wondering eyes of Kings, Kaisers, and canaille sustained the historic reputation of the scene. For here on this Champs de Mars did noble, abbé, proletarian, great lady, and grisette work at the mounds that were to circumscribe the theatre of the Fête de la Fédération; here did Louis XVI. on a new altar swear to a newer constitution, here, in the words of Lamartine, had the "Red flag, streaming with a nation's blood, made its sanguinary circle"; here had the first Exhibition of manufactures been held in 1798, and here, during the Hundred Days had the First Napoléon, on this same Champs de Mars, (re-christened Champs de Mai,) at another altar taken oaths to another code. Few spots have condensed more history in a brief space of time, nor was the present event unworthy of the past memories. To speak now of the practical, the Exhibition opened on the 1st April and closed on the 3rd November, a total of 117 days, Sundays included; the total number of visitors was 6,805,969; that of exhibitors, 42,217, and the amount received, 420,7357. 78. 2d. The greatest number of visitors on any one day being 173,923, on October 27th. Leeds in 1868 linked Art with Charity in an Exhibition rivalling the Manchester gathering of '57, her display of last year stopping short at the prosaic and practical. In '69, Amsterdam, and in '68, Roumania, at Bucharest, had their Exhibitions, whilst Altona and Cassel in '70 repeated the oft-told tale; Russia, in the same year, renewing her expositions of the Empire at St. Petersburgh. At Moscow, in 1872, the Polytechnic Exhibition, held in the historic Kremlin, marked an era in Russian industrial history; the Dublin Exhibition of the same year of arts, industries, and manufactures, with its museum and national portrait gallery, attracting 420,000 visitors during the 154 days and 58 evenings it remained open. The Weltausstellung in the Prater of Vienna made memorable a year otherwise unnoteworthy, but the splendid pageant of '73 is so much a thing of to-day, that there seems little reason to again describe the main building with its rotunda (within which all the domes of the world could be enclosed), surmounted by the monster model of the Imperial crown, its jewels winking in the sunlight, "polished perturbation, golden care," its hall with marvels of machinery, its Palace of Fine Arts, its Museum of Amateurs, its Agricultural Halls, and the four hundred buildings set in its splendid park, the Persian palace with its mirror mosaics glistening in the sun Turkish, Egyptian, Japanese, Roumanian, Styrian, Swiss, Russian, Kirgish, Samwede, Sclav, Moorish, German, Bohemian, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, French, and English dwellings all scattered amidst woodland scenery; and as Paris in 1867 placed on view the triumph of her engineer, so Italy put |