These children, the Doctor answered, are all orphans; they are taken from no family, for by none are they owned; they are drawn from no calling, for to none are they specifically bred. They are all brought up to menial offices, though they are all instructed in reading and writing, and the females in needle-work; but they are all, systematically and indiscriminately, destined to be servants or apprentices, at the age of fifteen; from which period, all their hold upon the benevolent institution to which they are indebted for their infantine rescue from perishing cold and starving want, with their subsequent maintenance and tuition, is rotatorily transferred to new-born claimants; for the Hospital, then, has fulfilled its engagements; and the children must go forth to the world, whether to their benefit or their disgrace.
Were it not better, then, when there are subjects who are success-inviting, to bestow upon them professional improvement, with virtuous education? since, as long as operas, concerts, and theatres, are licensed by government, musical performers, vocal and instrumental, will inevitably be wanted, employed, and remunerated. And every state is surely best served, and the people of every country are surely the most encouraged, when the nation suffices for itself, and no foreign aid is necessarily called in, to share either the fame or the emoluments of public performances.
Stop, then; prohibit, proscribe—if it be possible,—all taste for foreign refinements, and for the exquisite finishing of foreign melody and harmony; or establish a school on our own soil, in which, as in Painting and in Sculpture, the foreign perfection of arts may be taught, transplanted, and culled, till they become indigenous.
And where, if not here, may subjects be found on whom such a national trial may be made with the least danger of injury? subjects who have been brought up with a strictness of regular habits that has warded them from all previous mischief; yet who are too helpless and ignorant, as well as poor, to be able to develop whether or not Nature, in her secret workings, has kindled within their unconscious bosoms, a spark, a single spark of harmonic fire, that might light them, from being hewers of wood, and brushers of spiders, to those regions of vocal and instrumental excellence, that might propitiate the project of drawing from our own culture a school for music, of which the students, under proper moral and religious tutelage, might, in time, supersede the foreign auxiliaries by whom they are now utterly extinguished.
The objectors were charged, also, to weigh well that there was no law, or regulation, and no means whatsoever, that could prevent any of this little association from becoming singers and players, if they had musical powers, and such should be their wish: though, if self-thrown into that walk, singers and players only at the lowest theatres, or at the tea and cake public-gardens; or even in the streets, as fiddlers of country dances, or as ballad squallers: in which degraded exercise of their untaught endowments, not only decent life must necessarily be abandoned, but immorality, licentiousness, and riot, must assimilate with, or, rather, form a prominent part of their exhibitions and performances.
Here the discussion closed. The opponents were silenced, if not convinced, and the trial of the project was decreed.
The hardly-fought battle over, victory, waving her gay banners, that wafted to the Doctor hopes of future renown with present benediction, determined him, for the moment, to relinquish even his history, that he might devote every voluntary thought to consolidating this scheme.
The primary object of his consideration, because the most conscientious, was the preservation of the morals, and fair conduct of the pupils. And here, the exemplary character, and the purity of the principles of Dr. Burney, would have shone forth to national advantage, had the expected prosperity of his design brought his meditated regulations into practice.
Vain would it be to attempt, and useless, if not vain, to describe his indignant consternation, when, while in the full occupation of these arrangements, a letter arrived to him from Sir Charles Whitworth, to make known, with great regret, that the undertaking was suddenly overthrown. The enemies to the attempt, who had seemed quashed, had merely lurked in ambush, to watch for an unsuspected moment to convene a partial committee; in which they voted out the scheme, as an innovation upon the original purpose of the institution; and pleading, also, an old act of parliament against its adoption, they solemnly proscribed it for ever.
Yet a repeal of that act had been fully intended before the plan, which, hitherto, had only been agitating and negotiating, should have been put into execution.