if later in life the mother marries and can prove that she is able to support her child, she can claim it again. The children are never allowed to be adopted. They are sent to foster-mothers in the country when first received, and only come to the hospital when they are six. The girls with few exceptions are trained for domestic service and the boys as regimental bandsmen, if they show talent, or they are apprenticed to different trades when they are fourteen.
There is something infinitely touching in the sight of these rows of small creatures, chanting with their trained treble voices, “Let me never be confounded,” when life had confounded them at its very gates. But seeing them later on, as every Sunday morning visitor is allowed to do, happily eating their dinners in their pleasant rooms, it is obvious that the life of the little brown-coated boy or white-capped girl in Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital has many things in its favour. One may compare their lot with that of more sophisticated children in the London slums, for whom it is necessary to have a society for their protection from the parents who have ill-treated over 100,000 in England in the last year.
One does not ordinarily associate a foundling hospital with the fine arts, but, as I said before, this is an exception. Hogarth not only painted the founder’s portrait and one or two other pictures that he gave to the hospital, but he persuaded his friends to do likewise. Sir Joshua Reynolds gave a portrait of Lord Dartmouth, Gainsborough a view of Charterhouse, Kneller a portrait of Handel, and the exhibition of these gifts, including a beautiful cartoon of Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents, was a forerunner of the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. The pictures alone are worth going to Guilford Street to see. Some of them are in the picture gallery with the cases holding tokens that in the old days before 1760 used to be left to identify the foundling. In the board-room, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful rooms in London, hangs Hogarth’s March to Finchley, of which I believe there is a copy in the ugly “Adam and Eve” public-house, built on the site of the “Adam and Eve” Inn of the picture, at the corner of the Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road.
The tale of how the hospital came to get the picture is rather quaint. Hogarth painted soldiers marching to Finchley in a state that their French confrères would call “débraillés.” He then asked George II. to buy it, but that monarch—the last English king to go into battle—was so enraged at this presentation of his soldiers, that he indignantly refused, and Hogarth, not being able to dispose of the picture elsewhere, issued lottery tickets for it. About sixty tickets were left on his hands, so he gave them to his favourite hospital, which won the picture, and there it is to-day.
The careful training of the child choir, and the choice of a musical career for the boys whenever possible, is only carrying on one of the earliest traditions, for Handel rivalled Hogarth in his interest and his gifts to the Foundling Hospital. He used to conduct performances of the Messiah in the chapel to crowded audiences, and as he induced the performers to give their services, the proceeds that he handed over sometimes amounted to nearly £1,000. In a glass case is carefully preserved the gift the great master bestowed on the hospital of the MS. of his oratorio, and near by is the autograph copy of the number of Good Words containing the story Dickens wrote about the Foundling Hospital.
In the secretary’s room is a fine old Jacobean oak table but lately retrieved from the kitchen premises where it had been in use for centuries.
South Kensington Museum
“Were I a physician I would prescribe nothing but Recipe,
CCCLXV drachm. Londin.”—Walpole.
One of the nicest things about the South Kensington Museum is the lively way it keeps in touch with what happens to be interesting Londoners at the moment.
Is there a loan exhibition of Spanish pictures at Burlington House, at once everything Spanish that the Museum possesses is gathered together so that the different phases of Spanish art may be conveniently noted, and there is nearly always some extra little exhibition of special interest, either in celebration of the centenary of some great artist or to introduce the work of some foreigner of outstanding merit like Mestrovic.