Page:The American fugitive in Europe.djvu/141

Rh lavished on her constitution and laws, the songs chanted to celebrate her glory, the lustre of her arms, as the glowing theme of her warriors, the thunder of her artillery in proclaiming her moral prowess, her flag being unfurled to every breeze and ocean, rolling to her shores the tribute of a thousand realms, show England to be the greatest nation in the world, and speak volumes for the great departed, as well as for those of the living present. One requires no company, no amusements, no books, in such a place as this. Time and death have placed within those walls sufficient to occupy the mind, if one should stay here a week.

On my return, I spent an hour very pleasantly in the Royal Academy, in the same building as the National Gallery. Many of the paintings here are of a fine order. Oliver Cromwell looking upon the headless corpse of King Charles I. appeared to draw the greatest number of spectators. A scene from "As You Like It" was one of the best executed pieces we saw. This was "Rosalind, Celia and Orlando." The artist did himself and the subject great credit. Kemble, in Hamlet, with that ever-memorable skull in his hand, was one of the pieces which we viewed with no little interest. It is strange that Hamlet is always represented as a thin, lean man, when the Hamlet of Shakspeare was a fat, John Bull kind of a man.

But the best piece in the gallery was "Dante meditating the episode of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, S'lnferno, Canto V." Our first interest for 12