feet long and 380 wide, and at the transept
is nearly 200 feet in height. Exhibition-rooms, reading-rooms,
restaurants, and a vast orchestral auditorium were included under one
roof, with bazaars and small shops and stalls innumerable.

The parks and garden were laid out to cover some two hundred acres, with
terraces and fountains galore, the idea being to produce somewhat the
effect as at Versailles, with Les Grande and Petite Eaux, on "grand days"
the fountains consuming over 6,000,000 gallons. Cricket, football, and
sports of various kinds used to draw vast throngs to "the Palace," and the
firework displays at night were, and are to-day, justly celebrated. In
short, this "Cockney Arcadia," if rather a tawdry attraction, has had the
benefit of much honest admiration of the Londoner, who perforce could not
get farther afield for his holiday, and its like can hardly be said to
exist elsewhere in Europe or America. Hence it must perforce rank in a way
as something unique in present-day outdoor entertainment, as near as is
left to us of those of the days of Ranelegh and Vauxhall. Beloved of the
clerk and shopkeeper, and altogether an attraction which few of their
class appear to be able to resist for long at a time.

London is no more the dread of the visitor who feared the ways that are
dark and the tricks that are vain.

London tricks are old as London's history, and from the days of Chaucer
the countryman's fear of London's vastness and the cheats practised by her
nimble-witted rogues have passed into literature. In the year 1450 John
Lydgate sang the sorrows of a simple Kentish wight, who found that, go
where he would in London, he could not speed without money:

"To London once, my stepps I bent,
Where trouth in no wyse shoulf be faynt;
To Westmynster ward I forthwith went,
To a man of law to make complaynt.
I sayd, 'for Mary's love, that holy saynt!
Pity the poor that would proceede;'
But for lack of mony I cold not spede."

After going among the lawyers of King's Bench, the Flemings of Westminster
Hall with their hats and spectacles, the cloth men and drapers of
Cheapside, and the butchers of Eastcheap, poor Lackpenny found that
nowhere, without money, could he be sped in London. His final adventure
and reflections were these:

"Then hyed I me to Belynsgate;
And one cryed 'hoo, go we hence!'
I prayd a barge man for God's sake,
That he wold spare me my expence.
'Thou scapst not here