The first thing we did, before fairly getting into the palace, was to sit
down in a large ante-hall, and get some bread and butter and a pint of
Bass's pale ale, together with a cup of coffee for S-----. This was the
best refreshment we could find at that spot; but farther within we found
abundance of refreshment-rooms, and John Bull and his wife and family at
fifty little round tables, busily engaged with cold fowl, cold beef, ham,
tongue, and bottles of ale and stout, and half-pint decanters of sherry.
The English probably eat with more simple enjoyment than any other
people; not ravenously, as we often do, and not exquisitely and
artificially, like the French, but deliberately and vigorously, and with
due absorption in the business, so that nothing good is lost upon
them. . . . . It is remarkable how large a feature the refreshment-rooms
make in the arrangements of the Crystal Palace.
The Crystal Palace is a gigantic toy for the English people to play with.
The design seems to be to reproduce all past ages, by representing the
features of their interior architecture, costume, religion, domestic
life, and everything that can be expressed by paint and plaster; and,
likewise, to bring all climates and regions of the earth within these
enchanted precincts, with their inhabitants and animals in living
semblance, and their vegetable productions, as far as possible, alive and
real.
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