WILLIAM BLAKE.
(Continued from p. 71.)
I venture to send you another Note regarding William Blake, claiming for that humble individual the honour of being the pioneer in the establishment of charity-schools in Britain, from which department of our social system who can calculate the benefits accrued, and constantly accruing, to this country!
We look in vain through the Silver Drops of William Blake for any record of an existing institution, such as he would have his "noble ladies" rear at Highgate. Among the many incentives he uses to prompt the charitable, we do not find him holding up for their example any model (unless it be "Old Sutton's brave hospital"); in all his amusing "Charity-school Sticks," his tone is that of a man trying to persuade people that the thing he proposes is feasible. "Some of them," says the sanguine Blake, "have scarce faith enough to believe in the success of this great and good design. Nay, your brother Cornish himself," continues he, in addressing one of his ladies, although full of good works, "would have persuaded me to lay it down" upon the ground of its impracticability. The language of Blake is everywhere advocating this "new way of charity." "If it be new," says he to an objector, "the more's the pity;" and, with reference to the possibility of failure, he would thus shame them into liberality. Speaking of his "fine, handsome, and well cloathed boys; not too fine, because they are the ladies'!" our enthusiast adds to this soft sawdur:
"But now, if a year or two hence they should be grown, which God forbid! poor ragged, half-starved, and no cloaths, country folks would say, who ride or go that way, Were there not good ladies enough in and about London to maintain one little school?"
Here then is primâ facie evidence, I think, that my subject, poor crazy William Blake, was the originator of one of the greatest social improvements of modern times.
The charity-school movement had obtained a strong hold upon the public mind early in the past century; but although I have sought for the name of Blake through many books professing to give an account of the early history of such institutions, I have not yet met with the slightest allusion to him, his school, or his Silver Drops.
The superficial inquirer into the history of English charity-schools will be told that the honour of the first erecting such, and caring for destitute children, is popularly considered due to the parishes of St. Botulph, Aldgate, and St. Margaret's, Westminster: and if he would farther satisfy himself upon that point, he will see it claimed by the first named; a slab in front of their schools, adjoining the Royal Mint, bearing an inscription to the purport that it was the first Protestant charity-school, erected by voluntary contributions in 1693.
If it comes to the earliest London school for poor children, perhaps the Catholics take the lead; for we find that it was part of the tactics of the Jesuits, in the reign of James II., to promote their design of subverting the Protestant religion by infusing their Romish tenets into the minds of the children of the poor by providing schools for them in the Savoy and Westminster.