One thing struck me as I wandered hour after hour through these galleries, and that was the total lack of education in the commonest rudiments of art, and the complete ignorance manifested in the remarks of the boors who gave the greatest works of their countrymen but a passing glance, and walked on in stupid stolidity. At Versailles or Florence, there was life, enthusiasm, and criticism of a very fair kind noticeable in the remarks of delight or disapproval which came from groups around a famous painting or a daub, but at the National Gallery the cattle-show and the pot of beer was still uppermost in all the looks and phrases of the spectators who used the place as a show room to pass an hour away.
NAKED AND NEEDY.
NE hundred and thirty years ago, infanticide and desertion of children, were twin crimes, very prevalent among English women of the humbler and lower classes. The dull, twaddling, gossip-monging newspapers of that day were often the vehicle through which the public ascertained that infants were found in dust-bins and dark alleys, and on dung-hills, there exposed by their miserable and heartless mothers to starvation and storm. Twenty or thirty children per week were exposed, in London, after this fashion, and the evil grew to such an extent that it served to awaken the benevolence of God-fearing men and women, and among those was one Capt. Coram, a seafaring man who, by his long and repeated voyages and wanderings over many lands and in many strange waters, had accumulated a large sum of money.
I fancy I can see that brave old fellow now in his closely buttoned-up tunic, his three-cornered mariner's hat set askew, his eyes beaming with kindness and compassion, picking his steps through the worst holes and quarters of Old London, the London of Queen Anne and of Bolingbroke, of conspiracies, of Hanoverian Successions, of Highwaymen and Newgate, and of all the faded memories of that olden time which enthrall sense and memory, when we try to recall that which we can only see as Macaulay saw it by the light of old newspaper scraps, chronicles, and by the memoirs and diaries, of the then insignificant but to-day useful people, like Evelyn and Pepys.