entirely to reading and to music, in which he is a masterly proficient, and, to the regret of his friends, rarely uses his pen. With these exceptions, we have found trace of no literary work done by blind men of late years, except a volume or two of dreary vapid rhyme, or of querulous, discontented repining at the neglect with which the authors have been treated. Dr. Bull, from whose work on Blindness we have already quoted, was a physician in good practice when he lost his sight, and therefore does not fall within our list.*

We are acquainted with other blind men of rank and education, and fully entitled to take a place among those above named ; and there are, of course, scattered through England a much larger number well known by their friends to be possessed of like attainments. These form a separate and distinct body, apart by themselves, and to them our general remarks do not apply. But out of the 30,000 blind people in Great Britain, a very large proportion belong to the middle and lower classes, where there are indeed many mothers of shrewd wit and loving hearts, who have all the wish but none of the power to educate the blind child, and where also, as statistics tell us, blindness specially prevails because smallpox and fever go hand in hand with impure air and scanty food; and many a little one whom disease spares, some chance blow from a stick or a stone, a sudden fall, cold, exposure, or neglect, dooms to life-long darkness. The 30,000 are scattered over Great Britain very unequally; in England and Wales the ratio of blind to the seeing is 1 in 1037; Scotland gives 1 in 1086; Ireland 1 in 843; the Channel Islands 1 in 728. Blindness is far more prevalent in rural districts than in those devoted to manufacturing and mining. In Wilts, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall the ratio is 1 in 793; but in the Eastern Counties 1 in 902; in Cheshire and Lancashire, 1 in 1253; in Bedfordshire, where the young people are chiefly busied in straw-plaiting, it falls to 1 in 1325; while in Herefordshire, with its noble woods, rivers, mountains, and valleys, it suddenly rises to 1 in 693. The Registrar-General endeavours to account for some of these differences in statistics by saying that the rural districts contain a larger number of persons in advanced life than in towns and manufacturing districts; while the young and healthy migrate into the manufacturing districts as apprentices, artisans, and servants. This is

*Prescott is no exception, because, although his gradually failing sight at last ended in almost total blindness, he was an educated man before his trouble befel him, and then nobly toiled on in spite of it. Nor is Mr. Fawcett, the present Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, whose stores of learning, like Milton's, were laid up before he lost his sight, a few years ago.

not

not quite a sufficient cause for the great difference of ratio; but the increased number of blind people in Ireland since 1851 (though before that date she had been visited by several fierce outbreaks of epidemic ophthalmia) is clearly explained by the fact that while the population in the ten years (1851-1861) has fallen, chiefly by emigration, by 750,000, blindness, which cannot emigrate, has kept to its usual proportion of victims, and the ratio is now 1 in 843, higher in fact than in any other part of Great Britain, except the Channel Islands, where coarse and scanty food, dirt, and defiance of all sanitary laws among the poorer classes, are bearing their usual deadly fruit. If statistics, always treacherous in matters of age, can be trusted, it seems that out of the 20,000 blind persons in England, about one-seventh are under twenty years of age; a large number of whom must be of a right age to enter a blind school. Yet of these, only 760 are now actually under instruction, and the thirteen existing schools provide accommodation only for about a thousand pupils. The schools are scattered over England in a defective ratio, as a couple of examples from the Census will show. In the wide-spread county of York, with its population of 2,000,000, and 2630 blind persons (of whom at least 260 are under 20 years), there is but one school for 65 children; while in the South-Midland and Welsh divisions, with a population of 2,600,000, and 2630 blind people, there is neither school nor asylum. The list of schools, as the Registrar gives them, is as follows:-London (2), Brighton, Norwich, Exeter, Bath,† Bristol, Birmingham, Nottingham, Liverpool (2), Manchester, York, Newcastle-on-Tyne; to which must be added two small but flourishing schools at Plymouth and Devonport, as

* The statistics of blindness in England are of the scantiest kind: in America, in spite of all the horrors of civil war, they manage to be more explicit.—Report of Pennsylvanian B. School, 1865.

The Bath School, though one of the smallest, is certainly one of the most efficient schools in England; mainly owing to the unwearied exertions of the Secretary, Miss Elwin, and the Committee of Ladies who work with her.

Vol. 118.-No. 236.

well as the Manufactory for the Blind at Sheffield, employing twenty-nine workers, at an average of about 7s. per week. The earliest of these was founded at Liverpool, in the year 1791; then came Edinburgh and Bristol, and next, in 1799, the School for the Indigent Blind, in St. George's Fields, the largest in England, and in point of education, mental, moral, and industrial, to be fairly taken as a type of what can be, and ought to be, done for blind children of that class. In some of the other schools a greater stress seems to be laid on the industrial work, and in one or two, work in the school-room seems to be almost omitted. But industrial work alone, without mental instruction, will have even a worse effect on a blind boy than on one with eyes. It will slowly and gradually tend to degrade him to a mere working machine; whereas, the grand object is to prevent this degradation, to lessen in every possible way his isolation, to bind him fast to the rest of the world by every tie of community of feeling, as far as may be by community of knowledge, thought, and action; and to crown the whole work with the happy truth that all are the children of one Father, to whom He has given each his own toil, capacity, place, and reward. No exact rule as to the precise proportion of mental to industrial work, in all cases, can be laid down. Much must depend on the ages of the pupils, the number of teachers and of scholars, as well as the variety of work. But the two occupations should act and re-act on each other; the making of a mat or a basket be a relief after the horrors of Long Division, or the toil of embossing; and a chapter of English History, of St. Mark, or Robinson Crusoe, give spirit to the busy craftsman at his manual work; and that of course, in addition to the daily chapel service in which he takes a vital part, as well as to the more direct moral or religious classteaching of the chaplain.

A single sentence will tell the various kinds of industrial work carried on in English schools, and nearly all of them to be found in operation at St. George's Fields-basket-work, mats, rugs, and cocoa-nut fibre matting of every description; brushes, sashline, knitting, netting, crochet, hair-work of great beauty and strength; chair-caning, mattress-making, and twine, with a few others which have some local cause and value. The great passion, however, in the life of a blind man once roused to work is music. Here he thinks he can achieve, if not immortality, at least renown and certain independence. It is to him a source of the highest, purest pleasure, a solace under all his troubles, almost light in his darkness. It rightly occupies a considerable place in the school we are considering; and the surprising

efficiency

efficiency attained is sufficiently proved by public concerts, at which sacred music, vocal and instrumental, of the highest class* is performed by a large blind choir, under the guidance of a blind organist. An instrumental band of thirty performers also executes secular music of a lighter kind with remarkable cleverness. But few blind men ever go beyond a certain amount of proficiency. To guide and accompany an intelligent choir through an ordinary service and simple anthem, or the chanting of the Psalms, they are quite able, and able to do it well; and this, and even more than this they do, in turn, in their own solemn and striking chapel service. But unfortunately for the blind musician, churchwardens and trustees in want of an organist are slow to believe in his powers, no matter how well attested; † and in a large number of cases, though his love for music still continues deep and unbroken as ever, once outside the school gates his practical acquaintance with music is over; or almost limited to such wooden strains as can be pounded out of some excruciating instrument which Mozart himself could not make endurable.

The twelve chief schools in England at present will accommodate only about 900 of the 2700 said to be under twenty years of age; and even this limited accommodation is not always put to its full test; for on the day of the census, April 8, 1861, only 760 were found to be under instruction in public institutions. The precise cause of this slackness in availing themselves of the chance of instruction it is difficult to ascertain; the expense of getting a child into one of the schools is small, and in most cases the education is free; so that apathy, neglect, and poverty are probably the greatest obstacles. Of those blind people above twenty years old, able and willing and having need to work, about 2350 are employed in general occupations, and chiefly among those who have sight, as labourers, miners, farmers (340), blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, &c.; while about 700 men carry on with greater success the more special work of blind men, as basketmakers, makers of mats, rope, and sacks, brushes, and brooms. Of the women, 200 are employed as domestic servants; for though a blind girl would hardly be a safe or efficient cook, she can, as experience has shown in

It will be sufficient merely to name such compositions as The Messiah,' 'Creation,' 'Elijah,' 'St. Paul,' 'Bach's Fugues,' and 'Mozart's Masses and

Anthems.'

Where they have a chance of setting to work as organists, they have succeeded admirably, as at Richmond, Battersea, Blackheath, Burneston, Bedale, North Mimms, Cobham, Shrewsbury, Balham, Yarmouth, and other places where old pupils are still at work.

many of the schools, be a first-rate hand at a broom, do all a housemaid's work (when the geography of the house is once known), make the beds, lay the dinner and breakfast-table,* shake the carpets, and help at the washing-tub; about 100 work as dressmakers and seamstresses, a point which, incredible as it may seem, is corroborated by the fact that almost all of the linen garments worn by the girls in St. George's School are made by themselves. The remaining 400 get a scanty living as makers of stays, knitted stockings, baskets, and brooms-doubly scanty because the beggarly pittance paid as wages to women with sight who work at these trades is, in their case, even lessened on the false plea that the work of the blind cannot be equal to that of the seeing. Thus we have a poor and industrious class of about 4800 who resolutely hold themselves above the degradation of begging in the streets, and in spite of all obstacles do their best to keep the wolf from the door. Of the stratum below these, who make begging their regular profession, and haunt the streets of London in every variety of miserable destitution and whining imposture, the census says nothing. They amount to many hundreds in number, and are for the most part well known to each other, and to some of their fraternity in the provinces. The most skilful in their profession of course find the best market for their talents in the great metropolis, of whom a tall, upright young man in rusty black clothes and kid gloves is probably one of the most successful. He, as many of our readers must remember, plants himself with his back firmly against the wall at the foot of the National Gallery, or in some other great thoroughfare, and appeals to the ceaseless multitude as they pass, either silently or, in pleasant, sunny weather, in a short discourse, flavoured with religious phraseology of a highly unctuous kind, but mainly consisting of his own reflections on things in general. He wears hung round his neck a small, neat placard, informing us that he has been 'respectably brought up and educated, but driven by dire necessity to appeal to the bowels of compassion,' &c. &c. &c. In fine weather he makes his four or five shillings a day, and, not keeping any canine establishment, nor apparently any human guide, can live in comparative clover. The lower grade of performers, far below him as artists, is sufficiently represented by a few well-known examples, such as the stout, elderly, good-natured looking man who sits in one of the recesses of Waterloo Bridge, and professes to be reading, in a loud, strong

This is done in St. George's Fields.

They also hem all sheeting, handkerchiefs, and towels. A special needle has been invented for the use of the blind, but these children use one of the common kind.