A country owes
much to human beings whose bodies she has worn out and whose immortal
parts she has left undeveloped or debased, as we find them here; and
having wasted an idle paragraph upon them, let me now suggest that old
men have a kind of susceptibility to moral impressions, and even (up to
an advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which often appears to come
to them after the active time of life is past. The Greenwich pensioners
might prove better subjects for true education now than in their
school-boy days; but then where is the Normal School that could educate
instructors for such a class?
There is a beautiful chapel for the pensioners, in the classic style,
over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at
it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains
me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity,
a knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the
spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other
limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience,
I seize this opportunity to wreak a life-long abhorrence upon the poor,
blameless man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an explosion
of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to me in the Athenaeum
Exhibition. Would fire burn it, I wonder?
The principal thing that they have to show you, at Greenwich Hospital,
is the Painted Hall.
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