386 SECOND JOURNEY IN EUROPE. (1851, 
On our way down the nave, we stopped for a mo- 
ment to see the Koh-i-noor, but the Mountain of 
Light looked to us little brighter than a piece of cut- 
glass. It does not come up to the general expecta- 
tion. Manage it as they will, it does not shine at all 
wonderfully, and the people got it into their heads 
that the authorities were shamming them with a glass 
imitation instead of the veritable Koh-i-noor; an 
idea well expressed in “ Punch,” who called it “ the 
knave of diamonds.” We determined to show our 
patriotism by going first of all carefully through the 
American department, and quite a trial to one’s pat- 
riotism it is, a great space, very scantily filled with 
an ill-assorted, incongruous collection (although they 
have given up to Russia and France about one quar- 
ter of the space that Mr. Lawrence asked for and 
insisted upon having): one long shelf displayed only 
half a dozen wooden pails; another side was decorated 
with a miserable collection of cast-off specimens of 
autumn-leaves, and below with a case containing five 
or six dozen bottles of prepared magnesia, all just 
alike, flanked at the sides with a similar collection of 
Old Jacob Townsend’s Sarsaparilla, surmounted by a 
portrait of the illustrious inventor. The strength of 
the nation has gone to daguerreotypes, of which there 
are about two thousand very good specimens of the 
art, it must be said, far better than they can produce 
in England. The same may be said of many things, 
creditable in themselves, but of which they have filled 
up their space, or attempted to fill it, with an enormous 
number of specimens, where one or two would suffice. 
But wherever anything is quite poor and commonplace, 
the exhibitor is sure to make it up in brag, in which 
it must be confessed we do * beat all creation.” 
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