I remember,
too, a breastplate of an Elector of Saxony, with a bullet-hole through
it. He received his mortal wound through that hole, and died of it two
days afterwards, three hundred years ago.
There was a crowd of visitors, insomuch that, it was difficult to get a
satisfactory view of the most interesting objects. They were nearly all
middling-class people; the Exhibition, I think, does not reach the lower
classed at all; in fact, it could not reach them, nor their betters
either, without a good deal of study to help it out. I shall go to-day,
and do my best to get profit out of it.
July 30th.--We all, with R----- and Fanny, went to the Exhibition
yesterday, and spent the day there; not J-----, however, for he went to
the Botanical Gardens. After some little skirmishing with other things,
I devoted myself to the historical portraits, which hang on both sides of
the great nave, and went through them pretty faithfully. The oldest are
pictures of Richard II. and Henry IV. and Edward IV. and Jane Shore, and
seem to have little or no merit as works of art, being cold and stiff,
the life having, perhaps, faded out of them; but these older painters
were trustworthy, inasmuch as they had no idea of making a picture, but
only of getting the face before them on canvas as accurately as they
could. All English history scarcely supplies half a dozen portraits
before the time of Henry VIII.; after that period, and through the reigns
of Elizabeth and James, there are many ugly pictures by Dutchmen and
Italians; and the collection is wonderfully rich in portraits of the time
of Charles I.
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