"Shall we never bury the hatchet?" asks Mr. Cobden. And Punch asks, "How can the hatchet be buried, when the peacemakers themselves so often throw it?"
IMPROVEMENTS OF LONDON VERSUS THE IMPROVEMENTS OF PARIS.
SOME attention having been lately called to the increasing magnificence of Paris, it is due to the national taste of this country to point out the improvements that have been lately effected and are now in progress in the British Metropolis.
To begin with Buckingham Palace; and indeed we may well say to "begin" with it, for we can scarcely hope to see it finished. Standing in front of the Palace, we look upon the enclosure of the Park, and we feel a national pride in stating that there has been an extensive addition to the valuable collection of aquatic birds which absorb so much of the attention—and the bread-crumbs—of the bystanders. Every one is familiar with the fountain opposite the Palace, and the familiarity of the public had been accompanied by a contempt which was perfectly natural. This fountain, formerly consisting of a stone ginger-beer bottle, standing in a round pie dish, has been removed, the operation having served the double purpose of improving a work of Art, and giving employment to one plumber, a bricklayer, and a bricklayer's labourer for nearly a fortnight. This stroke of policy combined the advancement of national taste with a propitiation of the working-class, or, at least, of those members of it—three in all—who were engaged in the transmogrification of the ginger-beer bottle in a pie dish complete to the present substitute, which, though highly effective, is exceedingly simple, and is, in fact, nothing but a plug-hole.
Turning our back upon this subterranean squirt, which we are happy to do, we walk up to the gates of the Palace, where taste and industry are at work in the form of a stone-mason, who is occupied in chipping the resemblance of a bunch of Prince of Wales's feathers on the stone-work to which the gates are appended. When this magnificent idea is realised on all the gate-posts, the spectator, looking from the north, will have no less than six feathers in his eye—a result that might be looked for in vain in any other capital of Europe. Turning our gaze upwards to the Palace, we are struck by the dazzling effect of several thousand pails of whitewash which have been lavished on the front of the royal residence, while, for the sake of contrast, the sides and back of the building have been left in all their pristine dirtiness.
We will now proceed to the City, by Pall Mall; and, on our way, we will stop at the Ordnance Office where, as it is a public building, we will see what public taste and public money have effected. The architect has, with a boldness amounting to audacity, piled an extra attic on to each of the two wings, thus producing a wondrous novelty of effect by making the sides of the building considerably higher than the centre. Criticism might, perhaps, complain of a rather too free use of the cowl—and, indeed, of a rather startling variety of cowls—in the treatment of the chimney-pots. Passing eastwards, and shutting our eyes—for obvious reasons—as we traverse Trafalgar Square, we turn round when we reach the Strand, and catch a glimpse of the pigtail of George the Third forming a sort of parallax to the Electric Clock, which is the star of the neighbourhood. The first remarkable work of Art that greets us on our way is the wooden figure of a Mandarin, which nods to us from the window of a tea-dealer's; and this curious specimen of sculpture in wood is faced by a remarkable piece of carving in the form of a joint of cold meat in the cook's shop opposite. Finding ourselves eventually in the City, we pass the end of Farringdon Street, pausing for a moment at the Waithman Monument, and thinking that the artist who gave his head to this block ought to have his head given to another.
But we now approach the more ambitious improvements that have been effected in the City at an enormous cost, and we are struck with astonishment at the bold effort that has been made by the architect of the Manchester Warehouse on the right to destroy the effect of St. Paul's, by raising up an ordinary brick structure to a considerable height above the roof of the Cathedral, and thus suggesting the recollection of the frog and the ox in the fable. The architect of the Manchester Warehouse, who is some unknown "bird," has endeavoured to swell himself out to the dimensions of a Wren, and the result is, that though he may have damaged the effect of St. Paul's, he has made his own paltry pile ridiculous by its juxtaposition to the great metropolitan monument.