H. C. Selaus.] [From an Engraving.
THE OPENING CEREMONY OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION OF 1851.
The Queen, Prince Consort, Duchess of Kent, and the Royal Children on the Dais; members of the Ministry on the left; Foreign Ambassadors on the right.
While this agitation and these debates were in progress, it may be believed that many people were far from hospitably disposed towards the crowds of foreigners which the Great Exhibition was designed to draw to London. |Opening of the Great Exhibition.| But all hostile criticism was reduced, first to whispers, by the marvellous success of the structure itself, and then to silence, by the splendour of the opening ceremony and of the display within the building. It is the poet’s gift to store the essence of events in very small phials, and Thackeray’s May Day Ode vividly reflects the feelings of the nation on that far-off spring morning:
“But yesterday a naked sod,
The dandies sneered from Rotten Row,
And cantered o’er it to and fro;
And see, ’tis done!
As though ’twere by a wizard’s rod,
A blazing arch of lucid glass