795 paintings of various artists, and of various degrees of merit, in which the names of every English painter of conscquence is included by his works.

The chief collection in this division is that of Turner, the great colorist, and here are exhibited in a saloon by themselves the finest specimens of that great painter's works, in all numbering over one hundred subjects, which, together with a large collection of drawings and water colors, he bequeathed to the English people.

The Foreign School is sub-divided into the Italian, Spanish, Flemish, and French Schools, and these schools embrace 797 fine pictures, in which the old masters chiefly predominate. Three of Corregio's pictures in this gallery cost £15,000, and the latest acquisition is a Michael Angelo valued at £30,000.

The Gallery is open to the public on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays; and on Thursdays and Fridays to students only. It is open from Ten to Five from October until April 30, inclusive; and from Ten to Six from April until the middle of September. It is wholly closed during the month of October.

Daily this free gallery of art is thrown open to the working people who enjoy the paintings, excepting on the days specified. There is no charge whatever excepting for catalogues of the British and Foreign Schools, which cost a shilling each.

The question of opening the Galleries on Sunday has been much agitated of late, but I question if the British public, particularly the working or artisan class, care much for paintings. The lower classes of Englishmen are not, as a rule, very esthetical in their views or ideas, and I think the British masses are best calculated to shine at a cattle-show. There is nothing in this world so capable of striking an average Englishman's fancy as a huge ox or a mountain of moving beef.

Corregio's master picces, Turner's flaming colors, or Claude's landscapes do not move him at all; but take him to a cattleshow, and behold he is all life and animation, and give him a

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pot of beer in his red fist, and he becomes positively witty, and capable of conversation.

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.

CHAPTER XXVIII

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 sea-faring 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.

Who will not bless that noble old sailor, as I did, the May

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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.

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 scafaring 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 chains,-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