“There, by all votes approved, The wide world’s wares display, The Market first removed For ever and a day.” Prince Albert’s academic cap is typical of his being LL.D. and Chancellor of Cambridge; and the singular-looking being addressing him is a staunch and bigoted Tory, whom _Punch_ delighted to caricature, Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, M.P. for Lincoln, whose opposition to the Exhibition of 1851 amounted almost to mania. Take, for instance, the following quotation from a speech of his in the House of Commons on the subject (26 July, 1850):-- “Hyde Park was emphatically the Park of the People, and it was now proposed to be devoted to purposes which he must hold to be prejudicial to the people in a moral, religious, and social point of view. It was sought to appropriate it to the encouragement of--what? To the encouragement of everything calculated to be prejudicial to the interests of the people. An exhibition of the industry of all nations, forsooth! An exhibition of the trumpery and trash of foreign countries, to the detriment of our own already too much oppressed manufacturers.... They were flying in the face of the rights of the public merely to gratify the foreigner, who had no right to be here at all.” On another occasion he said, “They might call it success, but he called it failure. He did not wish to see that building destroyed by any acts of violence, but would to God that some hailstorm, or some visitation of lightning, might descend to defeat the ill-advised project.” For this he had to sit for his portrait once again. _Punch_, 15th February, 1851. On the opening day of the Exhibition, Parliament sat afterwards, at 6 p.m., and, in the course of a debate on the “Oath of Abjuration (Jews) Bill,” Colonel Sibthorp told the House that “He was not present at the Crystal Palace. He felt that his duty to God and his country demanded of him that he should not go there, and he deeply regretted that an eminent prelate of the Church should have been induced to invoke a blessing on that which he (Colonel S.) considered most injurious to the interests of the country and an insult to Almighty God.” But if Colonel Sibthorp took a pessimistic view of the Exhibition, others held equally optimistic opinions respecting it. It was going to inaugurate a sort of Millennium and a general brotherhood of nations: war was to cease, and all countries were to vie with each other in cultivating the arts of peace. The following song will show the drivel they used to sing about it in the streets. CRYSTAL PALACE. Britannia’s sons an attentive ear One moment lend to me, Whether tillers of our fruitful soil, Or lords of high degree. Mechanic too, and artizan, Old England’s pride and boast, Whose wondrous skill has spread around Far, far from Britain’s coast. _Chorus._