Chapter XV: Lady Lufton’s Ambassador (2)

Our exertions enabled us to do ample justice to an elaborate Chinese repast, which the chief magistrate, in the plenitude of his civility, sent over to us on our return. Before leaving Fayune, the general and a number of officers were entertained at dinner by this high functionary, and the head of the gentry of the district. The latter personage had been very active in the enlistment of Braves against us, and like the rest of his class, had hoped by the manifestation of zeal in his hostility to barbarians, to curry favour with the government: he now professed the utmost friendship for us, and expressed sincere regret for what had occurred, in opposition, as he declared, to his urgent remonstrances. After the usual interchange of pretty speeches, and consumption of greasy viands, we took leave of our smooth-tongued hosts, and once more striking camp, marched out of Fayune, having thoroughly accomplished the object of our visits. The troops re-entered Canton on the evening of the following day, having marched between sixty and seventy miles in five days, without encountering any of those difficulties which are predicted in the coming operations, and having achieved the very satisfactory result of instilling confidence into the country people, and inspiring the Braves with a due respect for our arms. Since then the neighbourhood of Canton has been tranquil, and foreigners have been enabled to extend their explorations to greater distances than formerly, with perfect security.

The same effect will be produced in the north of China if the same means are resorted to. It was not until the local militia at Canton received a lesson which taught them our power of inflicting chastisement, that they subsided into respectful quiescence. So, in 1858, the Court of Pekin changed its tone of arrogance for one of subserviency the moment we arrived at Tien-tsin: a feat supposed impracticable by the Chinese government.

The effect of our unexpected appearance there may be best appreciated by the following paragraph, extracted from the secret edict already quoted. The Emperor, apologizing for the concessions made to us upon that occasion, asks, “Why is it then that we have succumbed to circumstances, and permitted the acceptance of terms of peace from the said barbarians? It was indeed for no other reason than that war had reached the portals of our Imperial domains; the enemy was at the gates of our capital, and in the train of war follow alarm and disorder; the people are scattered and rendered homeless. How could we endure that our people should suffer? Our rest was disturbed, and we could not eat in peace. No other course, therefore, was open to us but to concede what they requested, in order to put an end to the present distress.”

The distress here alluded to was in reality not felt by the people, not one of whom was turned out of his home by our presence at Tien-tsin, but by the Emperor himself. The impression at Pekin at present is, that the river having been staked, our reappearance at Tien-tsin is impossible. Hence the stubborn attitude of the Chinese government, encouraged by their confidence in the Tartar general, Sang-ko-lin-sin, who commanded at the last Peiho affair, and who has declared his intention, on all fixture occasions, of dealing with us in the same summary manner. His defeat, and the march of our troops to Tien-tsin, will produce the same result as our march to Fayune, or as our former operations on Tien-tsin. The difficulty of our diplomatists in China consists not so much in the process of extracting a treaty from the Chinese government, as in obliging them to keep it in the spirit in which it is made. This can only be done by exerting a continuous pressure upon the Cabinet at Pekin. The moment the pressure is removed, the government interprets obnoxious stipulations in its own manner; its functionaries at distant ports take their cue from the disposition at head-quarters, and complications arise with local officials, out of which ultimately spring new wars.

By dealing directly with the highest functionaries at the capital, these may invariably be prevented; but the isolation of a foreign minister at Pekin might possibly expose him to inconveniences, and even insults, which, in the absence of any force, it would be impossible to resent. Under these circumstances the most desirable compromise which could be made, would be in the selection of Tien-tsin, as a summer abode for the British plenipotentiary, with the right reserved to him of visiting the capital at pleasure. Here, at a distance of only fifty miles from Pekin, communication with the high functionaries there could be rapidly and easily maintained, while the occasional visits of members of the foreign missions would tend to familiarize the people, as well as the authorities, with the contact of Europeans, and go far to remove those prejudices which must ever, otherwise, subsist against us, and develop themselves through the means of local authorities at distant ports. Concurrently with the establishment of a mission at Tien-tsin, that city might be opened as a port to trade, and the reassuring influence of commerce be thus brought to second the efforts of a skilful and judicious diplomacy. During the winter months, when the Peiho would be frozen, and the port closed, the Minister would remove his establishment to Shanghai, not a little pleased to return to a higher state of civilization; while the terrible heats of summer, at this latter place, would be agreeably exchanged for the dry, healthy climate of Tien-tsin. Two or three gunboats, necessary, under any circumstances, for the protection of our commerce in the gulf and river, would also serve as an adequate and efficient support to our diplomacy. We might thus hope to achieve all the advantages to be derived from a residence at Pekin, without any of its inconveniences; and while leaving the prestige of the Imperial government comparatively uninjured, pave the way for the assimilation of our diplomatic relations with China to those of other countries.

Whether this be the course ultimately adopted or not, one thing is certain,—that Tien-tsin is the key of the position. All military and diplomatic action must, for the present, be alike centred upon it; and if a campaign in this quarter becomes necessary, we have little doubt that it will terminate within two months, in a treaty embracing larger concessions, based upon broader principles, and ensuring a more durable peace than that signed by Sir Henry Pottinger in 1842, after a bloody and expensive war, which extended along the whole southern seaboard of China, and was protracted over a period of two years.

Little Scholars.

Yesterday morning, as I was walking up a street in Pimlico, I came upon a crowd of little persons issuing from a narrow alley. Ever so many little people there were streaming through a wicket; running children, shouting children, loitering children, chattering children, and children spinning tops by the way, so that the whole street was awakened by the pleasant childish clatter. As I stand for an instant to see the procession go by, one little girl pops me an impromptu curtsey, at which another from a distant quarter, not behindhand in politeness, pops me another; and presently quite an irregular little volley of curtseyings goes off in every direction. Then I blandly inquire if school is over? and if there is anybody left in the house? A little brown-eyes nods her head, and says, “There’s a great many people left in the house.” And so there are, sure enough, as I find when I get in.

Down a narrow yard, with the workshops on one side and the schools on the other, in at a little door which leads into a big room where there are rafters, maps hanging on the walls, and remarks in immense letters, such as, “COFFEE IS GOOD FOR MY BREAKFAST,” and pictures of useful things, with the well-thumbed story underneath; a stove in the middle of the room; a paper hanging up on the door with the names of the teachers; and everywhere wooden benches and tables, made low and small for little legs and arms.

Well, the schoolroom is quite empty and silent now, and the little turmoil has poured eagerly out at the door. It is twelve o’clock, the sun is shining in the court, and something better than schooling is going on in the kitchen yonder. Who cares now where coffee comes from? or which are the chief cities in Europe? or in what year Stephen came to the throne? For is not twelve o’clock dinner-time with all sensible people? and what periods of history, what future aspirations, what distant events are as important to us—grown-up folks, and children, too—as this pleasant daily recurring one?

The kind, motherly schoolmistress who brought me in, tells me, that for a shilling, half-a-dozen little boys and girls can be treated to a wholesome meal. I wonder if it smells as good to them as it does to me, when I pull my shilling out of my pocket. The food costs more than twopence, but there is a fund to which people subscribe, and, with its help, the kitchen cooks all through the winter months.

All the children seem very fond of the good Mrs. K——. As we leave the schoolroom, one little thing comes up crying, and clinging to her, “A boy has been and ’it me!” But when the mistress says, “Well, never mind, you shall have your dinner,” the child is instantly consoled; “and you, and you, and you,” she continues; but this selection is too heartrending; and with the help of another lucky shilling, nobody present is left out. I remember particularly a lank child, with great black eyes and fuzzy hair, and a pinched grey face, who stood leaning against a wall in the sun: once, in the Pontine Marshes, years ago, I remember seeing such another figure. “That poor thing is seventeen,” says Mrs. K——. “She sometimes loiters here all day long; she has no mother: and she often comes and tells me her father is so drunk she dare not go home. I always give her a dinner when I can. This is the kitchen.”

The kitchen is a delightful little clean-scrubbed place, with rice pudding baking in the oven, and a young mistress, and a big girl, busy bringing in great caldrons full of the mutton broth I have been scenting all this time. It is a fresh, honest, hungry smell, quite different from that unwholesome compound of fry and sauce, and hot, pungent spice, and stew and mess, which comes steaming up, some seven hours later, into our dining-rooms, from the reeking kitchens below. Here a poor woman is waiting, with a jug, and a round-eyed baby. The mistress tells me the people in the neighbourhood are too glad to buy what is left of the children’s dinner. “Look what good stuff it is,” says Mrs. K——, and she shows me a bowl full of the jelly, to which it turns when cold. As the two girls come stepping through the sunny doorway, with the smoking jar between them, I think Mr. Millais might make a pretty picture of the little scene; but my attention is suddenly distracted by the round-eyed baby, who is peering down into the great soup-jug with such wide wide open eyes, and little hands outstretched—such an eager, happy face, that it almost made one laugh, and cry too, to see. The baby must be a favourite, for he is served, and goes off in his mother’s arms, keeping vigilant watch over the jug, while four or five other jugs and women are waiting still in the next room. Then into rows of little yellow basins our mistress pours the broth, and we now go in to see the company in the dining-hall, waiting for its banquet. Ah me! but it is a pleasanter sight to see than any company in all the land. Somehow, as the children say grace, I feel as if there was indeed a blessing on the food: a blessing which brings colour into these wan cheeks, and strength and warmth into these wasted little limbs. Meanwhile, the expectant company is growing rather impatient, and is battering the benches with its spoons, and tapping neighbouring heads as well. There goes a little guest, scrambling from his place across the room and back again. So many are here to-day, that they have not all got seats. I see the wan girl still standing against the wall, and there is her brother—a sociable little fellow, all dressed in corduroys—who is making funny faces at me across the room, at which some other little boys burst out laughing. But the infants on the dolls’-benches, at the other end, are the best fun. There they are—three, four, five years old—whispering and chattering, and tumbling over one another. Sometimes one infant falls suddenly forward, with its nose upon the table, and stops there quite contentedly; sometimes another disappears entirely under the legs, and is tugged up by its neighbours. A certain number of the infants have their dinner every day, the mistress tells me. Mrs. —— has said so, and hers is the kind hand which has provided for all these young ones; while a same kind heart has schemed how to shelter, to feed, to clothe, to teach, the greatest number of these hungry, and cold, and neglected little children.

As I am replying to the advances of my young friend in the corduroys, I suddenly hear a cry “Ooo! ooo! ooo!—noo spoons—noo spoons—ooo! ooo! ooo!” and all the little hands stretch out eagerly as one of the big girls goes by with a paper of shining metal spoons. By this time the basins of soup are travelling round, with hunches of home-made bread. “The infants are to have pudding first,” says the mistress, coming forward; and, in a few minutes more, all the little birds are busy pecking at their bread and pudding, of which they take up very small mouthfuls, in very big spoons, and let a good deal slobber down over their pinafores.

One little curly-haired boy, with a very grave face, was eating pudding very slowly and solemnly—so I said to him:

“Do you like pudding best?”

_Little Boy._ “Isss.”

“And can you read?”

_Little Boy._ “Isss.”

“And write?”

_Little Boy._ “Isss.”

“And have you got a sister?”

_Little Boy._ “Isss.”

“And does she wash your face so nicely?”

_Little Boy, extra solemn._ “No, see is wite a little girl; see is on’y four year old.”

“And how old are you?”

_Little Boy, with great dignity._ “_I_ am fi’ year old.”

Then he told me Mrs. Willis “wassed” his face, and he brought his sister to school.

“Where _is_ your sister?” says the mistress, going by.

But four-years was not forthcoming.

“I s’pose see has walt home,” says the child, and goes on with his pudding.

This little pair are orphans out of the workhouse, Mrs. K—— told me. But somebody pays Mrs. Willis for their keep.

There was another funny little thing, very small, sitting between two bigger boys, to whom I said—

“Are you a little boy or a little girl?”

“Little dirl,” says this baby, quite confidently.

“No, you ain’t,” cries the left-hand neighbour, very much excited.

“Yes, she is,” says right-hand neighbour.

And then three or four more join in, each taking a different view of the question. All this time corduroys is still grinning and making faces in his corner. I admire his brass buttons, upon which three or four more children instantly crowd round to look at them. One is a poor little deformed fellow, to whom buttons would be of very little use. He is in quite worn and ragged clothes: he looks as pale and thin almost as that poor girl I first noticed. He has no mother; he and his brother live alone with their father, who is out all day, and the children have to do everything for themselves. The young ones here who have no mothers seem by far the worst off. This little deformed boy, poor as he is, finds something to give away. Presently I see him scrambling over the backs of the others, and feeding them with small shreds of meat, which he takes out of his soup with his grubby little fingers, and which one little boy, called Thompson, is eating with immense relish. Mrs. K—— here comes up, and says that those who are hungry are to have some more. Thompson has some more, and so does another rosy little fellow; but the others have hardly finished what was first given them, and the very little ones send off their pudding half eaten, and ask for soup. The mistresses here are quite touchingly kind and thoughtful. I did not hear a sharp tone. All the children seemed at home, and happy, and gently dealt with. However cruelly want, and care, and harshness haunt their own homes, here at least there are only kind words and comfort for these poor little pilgrims whose toil has begun so early. Mrs. —— told me once, that often in winter time these children come barefooted through the snow, and so cold and hungry that they have fallen off their seats half fainting. We may be sure that such little sufferers—thanks to these Good Samaritans—will be tenderly picked up and cared for. But, I wonder, must there always be children in the world hungry and deserted? and will there never, out of all the abundance of the earth, be enough to spare to content those who want so little to make them happy?

Mrs. —— came in while I was still at the school, and took me over the workshops where the elder boys learn to carpenter and carve. Scores of drawing-rooms in Belgravia are bristling with the pretty little tables and ornaments these young artificers design. A young man with a scriptural name superintends the work; the boys are paid for their labour, and send out red velvet and twisted legs, and wood ornamented in a hundred devices. There is an industrial class for girls, too. The best and oldest are taken in, and taught housework, and kitchen-work, and sewing. Even the fathers and mothers come in for a share of the good things, and are invited to tea sometimes, and amused in the evening with magic lanterns, and conjurors, and lecturings. I do not dwell at greater length upon the industrial part of these schools, because I want to speak of another very similar institution I went to see another day.

On my way thither I had occasion to go through an old churchyard, full of graves and sunshine: a quaint old suburban place, with tree-tops and old brick houses all round about, and ancient windows looking down upon the quiet tombstones. Some children were playing among the graves, and two rosy little girls in big bonnets were sitting demurely on a stone, and grasping two babies that were placidly basking in the sun. The little girls look up and grin as I go by. I would ask them the way, only I know they won’t answer, and so I go on, out at an old iron gate, with a swinging lamp, up “Church Walk” (so it is written), and along a trim little terrace, to where a maid-of-all-work is scrubbing at her steps. When I ask the damsel my way to B—— Street, she says she “do-ant know B—— Street, but there’s Little Davis Street round the corner;” and when I say I’m afraid Little Davis Street is no good to me, she says, “’Tain’t Gunter’s Row, is it?” So I go off in despair, and after some minutes of brisk walking, find myself turning up the trim little terrace again, where the maid-of-all-work is still busy at her steps. This time, as we have a sort of acquaintance, I tell her that I am looking for a house where girls are taken in, and educated, and taught to be housemaids. At which confidence she brightens up, and says, “There’s a ’ouse round the-ar with somethink wrote on the door, jest where the little boy’s a-trundlin’ of his ’oop.”

And so, sure enough, following the hoop, I come to an old-fashioned house in a courtyard, and ring at a wooden door on which “Girls’ Industrial Schools” is painted up in white letters.

A little industrious girl, in a lilac pinafore, let me in, with a curtsey.

“May I come in and see the place?” say I.

“Please, yes,” says she (another curtsey). “Please, what name?—please, walk this way.”

“This way” leads through the court, where clothes are hanging on lines, into a little office-room, where my guide leaves me, with yet another little curtsey. In a minute the mistress comes out from the inner room. She is a kind smiling young woman, with a fresh face and a pleasant manner. She takes me in, and I see a dozen more girls in lilac pinafores reading round a deal table. They look mostly about thirteen or fourteen years old. I ask if this is all the school.

“No, not all,” the mistress says, counting, “some are in the laundry, and some are not at home. When they are old enough, they go out into the neighbourhood to help to wash, or cook, or what not. Go on, girls!” and the girls instantly begin to read again, and the mistress, opening a door, brings us out into the passage. “We have room for twenty-two,” says the little mistress; “and we dress them, and feed them, and teach them as well as we can. On week-days they wear anything we can find for them, but they have very nice frocks on Sundays. I never leave them; I sit with them, and sleep among them, and walk with them; they are always friendly and affectionate to me and among themselves, and are very good companions.”

In answer to my questions, she said that most of the children were put in by friends who paid half-a-crown a week for them, sometimes the parents themselves, but they could rarely afford it. That besides this, and what the girls could earn, 200_l._ a year is required for the rent of the house and expenses. “It has always been made up,” says the mistress, “but we can’t help being very anxious at times, as we have nothing certain, nor any regular subscriptions. Won’t you see the laundry?” she adds, opening a door.

In the laundry is a steam, and a clatter, and irons, and linen, and a little mangle, turned by two little girls, while two or three more are busy ironing under the superintendence of a washerwoman with tucked-up sleeves; piles of shirt-collars and handkerchiefs and linen are lying on the shelves, shirts and clothes are hanging on lines across the room. The little girls don’t stop, but go on busily.

“Where is Mary Anne?” says the mistress, with a little conscious pride.

“There she is, mum,” says the washerwoman, and Mary Anne steps out blushing from behind the mangle, with a hot iron in her hand and a hanging head.

“Mary Anne is our chief laundry-maid,” says the mistress, as we come out into the hall again. “For the first year I could make nothing of her; she was miserable in the kitchen, she couldn’t bear housework, she wouldn’t learn her lessons. In fact, I was quite unhappy about her, till one day I set her to ironing; she took to it instantly, and has been quite cheerful and busy ever since.”

So leaving Mary Anne to her vocation in life, we went up-stairs to the dormitories. The first floor is let to a lady, and one of the girls is chosen to wait upon her; the second floor is where they sleep, in fresh light rooms with open windows and sweet spring breezes blowing in across gardens and courtyards. The place was delightfully trim, and fresh, and peaceful; the little gray-coated beds stood in rows, with a basket at the foot of each, and texts were hanging up on the wall. In the next room stood a wardrobe full of the girls’ Sunday clothes, of which one of them keeps the key; after this came the mistress’s own room, as fresh and light and well kept as the rest.

These little maidens scrub, and cook, and wash, and sew. They make broth for the poor, and puddings. They are taught to read and write and count, and they learn geography and history as well. Many of them come from dark unwholesome alleys in the neighbourhood—from a dreary country of dirt and crime and foul talk. In this little convent all is fresh and pure, and the sunshine pours in at every window. I don’t know that the life is very exciting there, or that the days spent at the mangle, or round the deal table, can be very stirring ones. But surely they are well spent, learning useful arts, and order, and modesty, and cleanliness. Think of the cellars and slums from which these children come, and of the quiet little haven where they are fitted for the struggle of life, and are taught to be good, and industrious, and sober, and honest. It is only for a year or two, and then they will go out into the world again; into a world indeed of which we know but little—a world of cooks and kitchen-maids and general servants. I daresay these little industrious girls, sitting round that table and spelling out the Gospel of St. John this sunny afternoon, are longing and wistfully thinking about that wondrous coming time. Meanwhile the quiet hour goes by. I say farewell to the kind, smiling mistress; Mary Anne is still busy among her irons; I hear the mangle click as I pass, and the wooden door opens to let me out.

In another old house, standing in a deserted old square near the City, there is a school which interested me as much as any of those I have come across—a school for little Jewish boys and girls. We find a tranquil roomy old house with light windows, looking out into the quiet square with its ancient garden; a carved staircase; a little hall paved with black and white mosaic, whence two doors lead respectively to the Boys’ and Girls’ schools. Presently a little girl unlocks one of these doors, and runs up before us into the schoolroom—a long well-lighted room full of other little girls busy at their desks: little Hebrew maidens with Oriental faces, who look up at us as we come in. This is always rather an alarming moment; but Dr. ——, who knows the children, comes kindly to our help, and begins to tell us about the school. “It is an experiment,” he says, “and one which has answered admirably well. Any children are admitted, Christians as well as Jews; and none come without paying something every week, twopence or threepence, as they can afford, for many of them belong to the very poorest of the Jewish community. They receive a very high class of education.” (When I presently see what they are doing, and hear the questions they can answer, I begin to feel a very great respect for these little bits of girls in pinafores, and for the people who are experimenting on them.) “But the chief aim of the school is to teach them to help themselves, and to inculcate an honest self-dependence and independence.” And indeed, as I look at them, I cannot but be struck with a certain air of respectability and uprightness among these little creatures, as they sit there, so self-possessed, keen-eyed, well-mannered. “Could you give them a parsing lesson?” the doctor asks the schoolmistress, who shakes her head, and says it is their day for arithmetic, and she may not interrupt the order of their studies; but that they may answer any questions the doctor likes to put to them.

Quite little things, with their hair in curls, can tell you about tons and hundredweights, and how many horses it would take to draw a ton, and how many little girls to draw two-thirds of a ton, if so many little girls went to a horse; and if a horse were added, or a horse taken away, or two-eighths of the little girls, or three-fourths of the horse, or one-sixth of the ton,—until the room begins to spin breathlessly round and round, and I am left ever so far behindhand.

“Is _avoirdupois_ an English word?” Up goes a little hand, with fingers working eagerly, and a pretty little creature, with long black hair and a necklace, cries out that it is French, and means, _have weight_.

Then the doctor asks about early English history, and the hands still go up, and they know all about it; and so they do about civilization, and despotism, and charters, and Picts and Scots, and dynasties, and early lawgivers, and colonization, and reformation.

“Who was Martin Luther? Why did he leave the Catholic Church? What were indulgences?”

“You gave the Pope lots of money, sir, and he gave you dispensations.” This was from our little portress.

There was another little shrimp of a thing, with wonderful, long-slit, flashing eyes, who could answer anything almost, and whom the other little girls accordingly brought forward in triumph from a back row.

“Give me an instance of a free country?” asks the tired questioner.

“England, sir!” cry the little girls in a shout.

“And now of a country which is not free.”

“America,” cry two little voices; and then one adds, “Because there are slaves, sir.” “And France,” says a third; “and we have seen the emperor in the picture-shops.”

As I listen to them, I cannot help wishing that many of our little Christians were taught to be as independent and self-respecting in their dealings with the grown-up people who come to look at them. One would fancy that servility was a sacred institution, we cling to it so fondly. We seem to expect an absurd amount of respect from our inferiors; we are ready to pay back just as much to those above us in station: and hence I think, notwithstanding all the kindness of heart, all the well-meant and well-spent exertion we see in the world, there is often too great an inequality between those who teach and those who would learn, those who give and those whose harder part it is to receive.

We were quite sorry at last when the doctor made a little bow, and said, “Good morning, young ladies,” quite politely, to his pupils. It was too late to stop and talk to the little boys down below, but we went for a minute into an inner room out of the large boys’ schoolroom, and there we found half-a-dozen little men, with their hats on their heads, sitting on their benches, reading the _Psalms_ in Hebrew; and so we stood, for this minute before we came away, listening to David’s words spoken in David’s tongue, and ringing rather sadly in the boys’ touching childish voice.

But this is not by any means the principal school which the Jews have established in London. Deep in the heart of the City—beyond St. Paul’s—beyond the Cattle Market, with its countless pens—beyond Finsbury Square, and the narrow Barbican, travelling on through a dirty, close, thickly peopled region, you come to Bell Lane, in Spitalfields. And here you may step in at a door and suddenly find yourself in a wonderful country, in the midst of an unknown people, in a great hall sounding with the voices of hundreds of Jewish children. I know not if it is always so, or if this great assemblage is only temporary, during the preparation for the Passover, but all along the sides of this great room were curtained divisions, and classes sitting divided, busy at their tasks, and children upon children as far as you could see; and somehow as you look you almost see, not these children only, but their forefathers, the Children of Israel, camping in their tents, as they camped at Succoth, when they fled out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage. Some of these here present to-day are still flying from the house of bondage; many of them are the children of Poles, and Russians, and Hungarians, who have escaped over here to avoid conscription, and who arrive destitute and in great misery. But to be friendless, and in want, and poverty-stricken, is the best recommendation for admission to this noble charity. And here, as elsewhere, any one who comes to the door is taken in, Christian as well as Jew.

I have before me now the Report for the year 5619 (1858), during which 1,800 children have come to these schools daily. 10,000 in all have been admitted since the foundation of the school. The working alone of the establishment—salaries, repairs, books, laundresses, &c.—amounts to more than 2,000_l._ a year. Of this a very considerable portion goes in salaries to its officers, of whom I count more than fifty in the first page of the pamphlet. “12_l._ to a man for washing boys,” is surely well-spent money; “3_l._ to a beadle; 14_l._ for brooms and brushes; 1_l._ 19_s._ 6_d._ for repair of clocks,” are among the items. The annual subscriptions are under 500_l._, and the very existence of the place (so says the Report) depends on voluntary offerings at the anniversary. That some of these gifts come in with splendid generosity, I need scarcely say. Clothing for the whole school arrives at Easter once a year, and I saw great bales of boots for the boys waiting to be unpacked in their schoolroom. Tailors and shoemakers come and take measurings beforehand, so that everybody gets his own. To-day these artists having retired, carpenters and bricklayers are at work all about the place, and the great boys’ school, which is larger still than the girls’, is necessarily empty,—except that a group of teachers and monitors are standing in one corner talking and whispering together. The head master, with a black beard, comes down from a high desk in an inner room, and tells us about the place—about the cleverness of the children, and the scholarship lately founded; how well many of the boys turn out in after life, and for what good positions they are fitted by the education they are able to receive here;—“though Jews,” he said, “are debarred by their religious requirements from two-thirds of the employments which Christians are able to fill. Masters cannot afford to employ workmen who can only give their time from Monday to Friday afternoon. There are, therefore, only a very limited number of occupations open to us. Some of our boys rise to be ministers, and many become teachers here, in which case Government allows them a certain portion of their salary.”

The head mistress in the girls’ school was not less kind and ready to answer our questions. During the winter mornings, hot bread-and-milk are given out to any girl who chooses to ask for it, but only about a hundred come forward, of the very hungriest and poorest. When we came away from —— Square a day before, we had begun to think that all poor Jews were well and warmly clad, and had time to curl their hair and to look clean, and prosperous, and respectable, but here, alas! comes the old story of want, and sorrow, and neglect. What are these brown, lean, wan little figures, in loose gowns falling from their shoulders—black eyes, fuzzy, unkempt hair, strange bead necklaces round their throats, and ear-rings in their ears? I fancied these must be the Poles and Russians, but when I spoke to one of them she smiled and answered very nicely, in perfectly good English, and told me she liked writing best of all, and showed me a copy very neat, even, and legible.

Whole classes seemed busy sewing at lilac pinafores, which are, I suppose, a great national institution; others were ciphering and calling out the figures as the mistress chalked the sum upon a slate. Hebrew alphabets and sentences were hanging up upon the walls. All these little Hebrew maidens learn the language of their nation.

In the infant-school, a very fat little pouting baby, with dark eyes, and a little hook-nose and curly locks, and a blue necklace and funny ear-rings in her little rosy ears, came forward, grasping one of the mistresses’ fingers.

“This is a good little girl,” said that lady, “who knows her alphabet in Hebrew and in English.”

And the little girl looks up very solemn, as children do, to whom everything is of vast importance, and each little incident a great new fact. The infant-schools do not make part of the Bell Lane Establishment, though they are connected with it, and the children, as they grow up, and are infants no longer, draft off into the great free-school.

The infant-school is a light new building close by, with arcaded playgrounds, and plenty of light, and air, and freshness, though it stands in this dreary, grimy region. As we come into the schoolrooms we find, piled up on steps at either end, great living heaps of little infants, swaying, kicking, shouting for their dinner, beating aimlessly about with little legs and arms. Little Jew babies are uncommonly like little Christians; just as funny, as hungry, as helpless, and happy now that the bowls of food come steaming in. One, two, three, four, five little cook-boys, in white jackets, and caps, and aprons, appear in a line, with trays upon their heads, like the processions out of the Arabian Nights; and as each cook-boy appears, the children cheer, and the potatoes steam hotter and hotter, and the mistresses begin to ladle them out.

Rice and browned potatoes is the manna given twice a week to these hungry little Israelites. I rather wish for the soup and pudding certain small Christians are gobbling up just about this time in another corner of London; but this is but a halfpenny-worth, while the other meal costs a penny. You may count by hundreds here instead of by tens; and I don’t think there would be so much shouting at the little cook-boys if these hungry little beaks were not eager for their food. I was introduced to one little boy here, who seemed to be very much looked up to by his companions because he had one long curl right along the top of his head. As we were busy talking to him, a number of little things sitting on the floor were busy stroking and feeling with little gentle fingers the soft edges of a coat one of us had on, and the silk dress of a lady who was present.

The lady who takes chief charge of these 400 babies told us how the mothers as well as the children got assistance here in many ways, sometimes coming for advice, sometimes for small loans of money, which they always faithfully repay. She also showed us letters from some of the boys who have left and prospered in life. One from a youth who has lately been elected alderman in some distant colony. She took us into a classroom and gave a lesson to some twenty little creatures, while, as it seemed to me, all the 380 others were tapping at the door, and begging to be let in. It was an object-, and then a scripture-lesson, and given with the help of old familiar pictures. There was Abraham with his beard, and Isaac and the ram, hanging up against the wall; there was Moses, and the Egyptians, and Joseph, and the sack and the brethren, somewhat out of drawing. All these old friends gave one quite a homely feeling, and seemed to hold out friendly hands to us strangers and Philistines, standing within the gates of the chosen people.

Before we came away the mistress opened a door and showed us one of the prettiest and most touching sights I have ever seen. It was the arcaded playground full of happy, shouting, tumbling, scrambling little creatures: little tumbled-down ones kicking and shouting on the ground, absurd toddling races going on, whole files of little things wandering up and down with their arms round one another’s necks: a happy, friendly little multitude indeed: a sight good for sore eyes.

And so I suppose people of all nations and religions love and tend their little ones, and watch and yearn over them. I have seen little Catholics cared for by kind nuns with wistful tenderness, as the young ones came clinging to their black veils and playing with their chaplets;—little high-church maidens growing up rosy and happy amid crosses and mediæval texts, and chants, and dinners of fish, and kind and melancholy ladies in close caps and loose-cut dresses;—little low-church children smiling and dropping curtseys as they see the Rev. Mr. Faith-in-grace coming up the lane with tracts in his big pockets about pious negroes, and broken vessels, and devouring worms, and I daresay pennies and sugar-plums as well.

Who has not seen and noted these things, and blessed with a thankful, humble heart that fatherly Providence which has sent this pure and tender religion of little children to all creeds and to all the world?

The Carver’s Lesson.

Trust me, no mere skill of subtle tracery,
No mere practice of a dexterous hand,
Will suffice, without a hidden spirit,
That we may, or may not, understand.

And those quaint old fragments that are left us
Have their power in this,—the Carver brought
Earnest care, and reverent patience, only
Worthily to clothe some noble thought.

Shut, then, in the petals of the flowers,
Round the stems of all the lilies twine,
Hide beneath each bird’s or angel’s pinion,
Some wise meaning or some thought divine.

Place in stony hands that pray for ever
Tender words of peace, and strive to wind
Round the leafy scrolls and fretted niches
Some true, loving message to your kind.

Some will praise, some blame, and, soon forgetting,
Come and go, nor even pause to gaze;
Only now and then a passing stranger
Just may loiter with a word of praise.

But, I think, when years have floated onward,
And the stone is gray, and dim, and old,
And the hand forgotten that has carved it,
And the heart that dreamt it still and cold:

There may come some weary soul, o’erladen
With perplexed struggle in his brain,
Or, it may be, fretted with life’s turmoil,
Or made sore with some perpetual pain.

Then, I think, those stony hands will open,
And the gentle lilies overflow,
With the blessing and the loving token
That you hid there many years ago.

And the tendrils will unroll, and teach him
How to solve the problem of his pain;
And the birds’ and angels’ wings shake downward
On his heart a sweet and tender rain.

While he marvels at his fancy, reading
Meaning in that quaint and ancient scroll,
Little guessing that the loving Carver
Left a message for his weary soul.

A. A. P.

William Hogarth:

PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER.

_Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time._

IV.—THE PAINTER’S PROGRESS.

About the year of grace 1727 the world began to hear of William Hogarth, not only as a designer and engraver of pasquinades and book-plates, but as a painter in oils. He had even begun to know what patronage was; and it was, doubtless, not without a reason that his _Hudibras_ series was dedicated to “William Ward, Esquire, of Great Houghton, Northamptonshire.” In his early heraldic days, I find that he was once called upon to engrave an “Apollo in all his glory, azure.” He probably copied the figure from some French print; but in 1724 he was hard at work copying Apollo, and Marsyas to boot, at Thornhill’s Academy. Although he was sensible enough not to neglect the cultivation of the main chance, and with all convenient speed betook himself to the profitable vocation of portraiture or “face painting;” obtaining almost immediately, from his connection with the king’s sergeant painter, some aristocratic commissions—it is curious to observe that the young man’s bent lay in the direction of the historico-allegorical, then running neck-and-neck with the upholstery style of adornment. He had the epic-fever. Who among us has not suffered from that _fièvre brulante_—that generous malady of youth? How many contented sub-editors and quiet booksellers’ readers do we not know, who, in their hot adolescence, came to town, their portmanteaus bursting with the “Somethingiad,” in twenty-four cantos, or with blank-verse tragedies running to the orthodox five acts? Stipple, the charming domestic painter; Jonquil, who limns flowers and fruits so exquisitely, commenced with their enormous cartoons and show-clock oil-pictures: “Orestes pursued by the Eumenides,” “Departure of Regulus,”—_la vieille patraque_, in short—the old, heroic, impossible undertakings. And did not Liston imagine that he was born to play _Macbeth_? and did not Douglas Jerrold project a treatise on Natural Philosophy? and where is the little boarding-school miss that has not dreamt of riding in a carriage with a coronet on the panels, and being called her ladyship? Amina thinks the grandiloquent music of _Norma_ would suit her; the maiden speech of young Quintus Briscus is a tremendous outburst against ministers. Quintus is going to shake the country, and cut the Gordian knot of red-tape. The session after next he will be a junior Lord of the Treasury, the demurest and most complacent of placemen. Peers, politicians, pamphleteers, and players: we all find our level. Rolling about the board is not to be tolerated for any length of time: we _must_ peg in somewhere, and happy the man who finds himself in the right hole, and is satisfied with that state of life into which it has pleased heaven to call him!

Hogarth has his _fièvre brulante_; and, although he painted portraits, “conversations,” and “assemblies,” to eke out that livelihood of which the chief source was the employment given him by Philip Overton, Black-Horse Bowles, and the booksellers, he continued to hanker after torsos, and flying trumpets, and wide-waving wings, and flaunting drapery, and the other paraphernalia that went to furnish forth the apotheoses of monarchs and warriors in full-bottomed wigs. This preposterous school of art has long been in hopeless decay. You see the phantom caricature of it, only, in hair-dressers’ “toilette saloons” and provincial music-halls. Timon’s villa—the futile, costly caprice—has vanished. Old Montagu House is no more. Doctor Misaubin’s house, in St. Martin’s Lane, the staircase painted by Clermont (the Frenchman asked a thousand, and actually received five hundred guineas for his work), is not within my ken. Examples of this florid, truculent style, are becoming rarer and rarer every day. Painted ceilings and staircases yet linger in some grand old half-deserted country mansions, and in a few erst gorgeous merchants’ houses in Fenchurch and Leadenhall, now let out in flats as offices and chambers. If you have no objection to hazard a crick in your neck, you may crane it, and stare upwards at the ceil-paintings at Marlborough House, in Greenwich Hall, and on Hampton Court Palace staircase. The rest has ceded before stucco and stencilled paper-hangings; and even the French, who never neglect an opportunity or an excuse for ornamentation, and who still occasionally paint the ceilings of their palaces, seem to have quite lost the old Lebrun and Coypel traditions of perspective and foreshortening—overcharged and unnatural as they were (P. P. Rubens, in the Banqueting House, Whitehall, inventor)—and merely give you a picture stuck upon a rooftree, in which the figures are attenuated vertically, instead of sprawling down upon you, isometrically upside down.

Hogarth became useful to Sir James Thornhill. This last, a worthy, somewhat pompous, but industrious magnifico of the moment, a Covent Garden Caravaggio and cross between Raphael Mengs and the Groom-porter, had wit enough to discern the young designer and graver’s capacity, and condescended to patronize him. There is reason to believe that he employed William to assist in the production of his roomy works. When ceilings and domes were to be painted at two guineas the Flemish ell, it is not likely that Royal Sergeant painters and knights of the shire for Melcombe Regis could afford or would vouchsafe to cover with pigments and with their own courtly hands the whole of the required area. The vulgar, of course, imagined that the painter did all; that Thornhill lay for ever stretched on a mattress, swinging in a basket three hundred feet high in the empyrean of Wren’s dome, daubing away at his immense Peters and Pauls, or else stepping backwards to the edge of a crazy platform to contemplate the work he had done, and being within an ace of toppling over to inevitable crash of death beneath, when an astute colour-grinder saved his beloved master by flinging a brush at Paul’s great toe—cruel to be kind, and so causing the artist, in indignant apprehension of injury to his beloved saint, to rush forward, saving his own life and the toe likewise. A pretty parallel to this story is in that of the little boy in the Greek epigram who has crawled to the very edge of a precipice, and is attracted from his danger by the sight of his mother’s breast. A neat little anecdote, but—it is somewhat musty. It is a myth, I fear. The vulgar love such terse traditions. Zeuxis refusing to sell his pictures, because no sum of money was sufficient to buy them, and imitating fruit so nicely that the birds came and pecked at it; Parrhasius cozening Zeuxis into the belief that his simulated curtain was real, and crucifying a bondman (the wretch!) that he might transfer his contortions to canvas; Apelles inducing a horse to neigh in recognition of the steed he had drawn; Amurath teaching a French painter how properly to design the contracted muscles of the neck when the head is severed from the body by causing a slave to be decapitated in his presence: Correggio receiving the price of his master-work in farthings, or some vile copper Italian coinage, and dying under the weight of the sack in which he was carrying the sordid wage home; Cimabue ruddling the fleeces of his lambs with saintly triptichs, and the late Mr. Fuseli eating raw pork-chops for supper in order to design the “Nightmare,” more to the life: all these are _ben trovati_,—_ma non son veri_, I suspect.

Thornhill had not all his domes and ceilings and staircases to himself. When Augustus found Rome of brick and left it of marble, he did not execute all the quarrying and chiselling with his own imperial hands. In 1727, the painter M.P. for Melcombe Regis was at the high tide of celebrity. Many of the Flemish ells were covered by assistants. Here, I fancy, Van Shackaback of Little Britain, and sometime of Ghent in the Low Countries, was dexterous at war and art trophies, lyres, kettle-drums, laurel wreaths, bass-viols, and S. P. Q. R.’s, charmingly heaped up on a solid basis of cloud. Then little Vanderscamp, who had even been employed about the great king’s alcoves at Versailles, was wondrous cunning at the confection of those same purple and cream-coloured vapours. Lean Monsieur Carogne from Paris excelled in drapery; Gianbattista Ravioli, ex-history painter to the Seigniory of Venice, but vehemently suspected of having been a galley-slave in the Venetian arsenal, was unrivalled in flying Cupids. All these foreign aides-de-camp sprawled on their mattresses and made their fancy’s children to sprawl; goodman Thornhill superintending, touching up now and then, blaming, praising, pooh-poohing, talking of the gusto, taking snuff, then putting on his majestic wig and his grand laced hat, and departing in a serene manner in his coach to St. James’s or the House, thinking perhaps of one Rafaelle who painted the _loggie_ and _stanze_ of the Vatican, and of what a clever fellow he, James Thornhill, was.