The
walls of all these rooms are absolutely covered with pictures, including
works of all the great masters, which would require long study before a
new eye could enjoy them; and, seeing so many of them at once, and having
such a nothing of time to look at them all, I did not even try to see any
merit in them. Vandyke's picture of Charles I., on a white horse beneath
an arched gateway, made more impression on me than any other, and as I
recall it now, it seems as if I could see the king's noble, melancholy
face, and armed form, remembered not in picture, but in reality. All Sir
Peter Lely's lewd women, and Kneller's too, were in these rooms; and the
jolly old stupidity of George III. and his family, many times repeated;
and pictures by Titian, Rubens, and other famous hands, intermixed with
many by West, which provokingly drew the eye away from their betters. It
seems to me that a picture, of all other things, should be by itself;
whereas people always congregate them in galleries. To endeavor really
to see them, so arranged, is like trying to read a hundred poems at
once,--a most absurd attempt. Of all these pictures, I hardly recollect
any so well as a ridiculous old travesty of the Resurrection and Last
Judgment, where the dead people are represented as coming to life at the
sound of the trumpet,--the flesh re-establishing itself on the bones, one
man picking up his skull, and putting it on his shoulders,--and all
appearing greatly startled, only half awake, and at a loss what to do
next.
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