Excerpt from Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851: Delivered Before the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce; The Suggestion of H. R. H. Prince Albert, President of the Society

To write or speak the Epilogue after any great and grand Drama is by no means an easy task. Wesee the confession Of the difficulty in the very incongruity Of the manner in which the task is sometimes attempted; as, when after the curtain has fallen upon a deep and solemn tragedy, some startling attempt at wit and pleasantry is uttered to the audience; it may be by one of the characters, whose deep sorrows or lofty aims we have been following with the pro foundest interest. You will, at least, on the present occa sion, not have the difficulty of the task shown in this manner. Nor, indeed, is it my office, in any sense, to speak an epilogue at all. Perhaps such remarks as I have to make may rather be likened to the criticism which comes after the drama. For, as you know, Criticism does come after Poetry: the age of Criticism after the age Of Poetry; Aristotle after sopho cles, Longinus after Homer. And the reason of this has been well pointed out in our time - that words, that human language, appear in the form in which the poet utters them, and works with them for his purposes, before they appear in the form in which the critic must use them: language is picturesque and affecting, first; it is philosophical and critical afterwards -it is first concrete, then abstract - it acts first, it analyzes afterwards. And this is the case, not with words only, but with works also. The Poet, as the Greeks called him, was the Maker, as our English fathers, also, were wont to call him. And man's power Of making may show itself not only in the beautiful texture Of language, the grand machinery Of the epic, the sublime display of poetical imagery; but in those material works which supply the originals from which are taken the derivative terms which I have just been compelled to use in the d104ures of soft wool, or fine linen, or glossy silk, where the fancy disports itself in wreaths Of visible flowers; in the Machinery.

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