THE FATHER OF THE FOUNDLING.
Who will not bless that noble old sailor, as I did, the May evening I stood in the principal dormitory of the Foundling Hospital, in which were comfortably housed over fifty of the devoted lambs, sleeping with warm clothes covering their little bodies, and their infantile chirpings seeming like a chorus of angels, whose visits are alas—few but far between.
NURSERY IN THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL.
There was the row of cots, and the kind-hearted women attending to their wants, and when I gave one of them an orange, the little twelve-pounder seemed as glad as if it had descended from the loins of a Tudor or a Stuart, instead of being, as it was, both fatherless and motherless.
I can see him who was to be father of the first Foundling Hospital in England, losing his way purposely, night after night, among those dark and badly lighted and unpaved streets and lanes that fringed the Thames River in those days, and from which issued nightly shouts of murder and rapine, and the boisterous but less deadly revelry of bacchanalian seafaring men, in trunk hose and canvas tunics. I can see the link boys with their smoky torches passing to and fro as in a fevered dream and the bearers of sedan chairs,—the porters shouting at the brave-hearted grim seaman, who turns his kindly old eyes aside from the flashing glance of beauty shot at him in dumb wonder by the damsel on her way to Vauxhall, Ranelagh, or a Rout, and Captain Coram the meanwhile chatting and bestowing pennies upon the beggar's offspring or forsaken child. His heart was large as the seas which he had sailed over, and his happiest moment was when he had rescued from the gutters and death some poor foundling who had been thrown on the world to make its way.
He had first embarked in the Newfoundland trade, and after some time spent in ploughing the waters between England and the Colonies, he set up at Taunton, Massachusetts, as a shipwright, where he prospered apace. Then we find him, after some years, in Boston, where, by his enterprise, the manufacture of tar was established in the then infant Colonies. Home to Old England again after thirty years of wandering, and on landing at Cuxhaven the brave old man was set upon by thieves and ruffians and plundered of all his earnings. Then the Government, in 1732, appoints him as a trustee for the settlement of Georgia, and subsequently he is engaged in the colonization of Nova Scotia. Finally he came home to project and carry out the idea of his life, which was the establishment of a Foundling Hospital in London.
Never was there a more indefatigable or tireless philanthropist than this bluff old sailor. Insult, contumely, and humiliation he cheerfully underwent to carry out his cherished plan.
One cold, stinging, December day, in the year 1737, Thomas Coram,—who had been advised that the Princess Amelia was a charitable and well disposed lady, and would be, perhaps, favorable to an application for the scheme he had in view—started for St. James' Palace, the then residence of royalty—with his three-cornered hat well planted upon his head, and his coat buttoned up, and offered a petition for the formation of a foundling hospital through Lady Isabella Finch, the lady of the Bed Chamber in waiting, who turned upon Coram when he presented her the paper, like a vixen, and bade him begone with cutting words and sneers. The poor old fellow, with rage in his heart, strode from the doors of royalty and never troubled the Princess Amelia again.