eenwich
Hospital, and will pass through one of its spacious gate-ways for the
sake of glancing at an establishment which does more honor to the heart
of England than anything else that I am acquainted with, of a public
nature. It is very seldom that we can be sensible of anything like
kindliness in the acts or relations of such an artificial thing as a
National Government. Our own Government, I should conceive, is too much
an abstraction ever to feel any sympathy for its maimed sailors and
soldiers, though it will doubtless do them a severe kind of justice, as
chilling as the touch of steel. But it seemed to me that the Greenwich
pensioners are the petted children of the nation, and that the
Government is their dry-nurse, and that the old men themselves have a
childlike consciousness of their position. Very likely, a better sort of
life might have been arranged, and a wiser care bestowed on them;
but, such as it is, it enables them to spend a sluggish, careless,
comfortable old age, grumbling, growling, gruff, as if all the foul
weather of their past years were pent up within them, yet not much more
discontented than such weather-beaten and battle-battered fragments of
human kind must inevitably be. Their home, in its outward form, is on a
very magnificent plan. Its germ was a royal palace, the full expansion
of which has resulted in a series of edifices externally more beautiful
than any English palace that I have seen, consisting of several
quadrangles of stately architecture, united by colonnades and gravel
walks, and inclosing grassy squares, with statues in the centre, the
whole extending along the Thames. It is built of marble, or very
light-colored stone, in the classic style, with pillars and porticos,
which (to my own taste, and, I fancy, to that of the old sailors)
produce but a cold and shivery-effect in the English climate. Had I
been the architect, I would have studied the characters, habits, and
predilections of nautical people in Wapping, Rotherhithe, and the
neighborhood of the Tower, (places which I visited in affectionate
remembrance of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and other actual or mythological
navigators,) and would have built the hospital in a kind of ethereal
similitude to the narrow, dark, ugly, and inconvenient, but snug and
cozy homeliness of the sailor boarding-houses there. There can be no
question that all the above attributes, or enough of them to satisfy an
old sailor's heart, might be reconci