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    Untitled Article

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    Untitled Article

    riy ^ er , and had just completed witji - the fpoint of ? my stick a name upon the sand , which I came to myself soon enough

    not : to leave there , when a hale cruiser offered a coasting , which I gave welcome to ere it arrived , by making room on the end of the bench .

    Some of them pursue the occupation of holding horses at frequented haunts within reach , and others mount , upon three sticks , sorely bandaged , tubes

    containing certain glasses , through which the cockney looks , having paid the needful , and sees the landscape diminished to the size of a

    halfcrown . That one has a bright beetle with a pin through it under a glass , which he will show you for a penny , if you look " likely ; " but to some he will show it at once , and trust

    for his modicum to manoeuvres afterwards . So you begin talking , or suffer it to be begun , as thus : — "It is a miserable thingmiserable , very—this sort of

    life - i , < You hear of a storm or a battle , and then you hear of the unequal rewards of those who did the labour ; and so , you see , the value of money is , nothing like' now what it was when

    Greenwich Hospital was first made i what it was ; and if the money that is spent on statues and pillars was given to the widows of thosewho lost

    their litfes ^ it xwwald be . mdre sensible . T ^ Sotoie i ojE us * jyou see , have wives and families , and so we fare very hard ! The

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    time mqy come when they"l want sailors , and then they won ' t get ' em . I hear Russia is getting great power ; their fleet , they say , is creeping up . I don ' t

    think its , a right thing for a civilized country to stand by and see them getting on ; they let the Poles (' so they did' ) be used like un-Christian

    beasts ; " and so forth . Why this is all a pure echo of the aspiration of those slips of naval gentility who pray for a ff sickly season and a bloody war

    'VSo a Greenwich pensioner is solitary in . a crowd . He is coarsely sensual ; keenly selfish ; perfect in . low cunning ; - and heartily ready , did limbs remain to him , to subserve to

    anjhviolence , to execute any bloodshed , for present pay ; for chance of plunder and prizemoney . His life is spent in a large proportion of listnessness ; another part goes in the prosecution of small means of small

    acquisitiveness ; and the rest in the coarse consumption of the product . A Greenwich pensioner , then , is not happy— -and why not ? His own statement of his own grievances , —^ wa &t of more beer and more tobacco , — :

    will not account for this . It is not so much that he has not what lie wants , as that fee wants not ; what he has aniopporjfcuMfcy of having * There is aQoWunificence in the provision for him , truly ; but the matter is not to , be < jnenctad by an

    increase of his income * .,. . -., « t m > Who is it that has narrowed ,

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    Greenwich ^ s Pensioners and its Pictures . 237

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 1, 1837, page 237, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1836/page/13/