[Picture: The Charity Children]
These charity children are coming from church, with the two
parish-beadles before them. Several thousands of poor children are
taught to read, work, and write, in the different charity-schools of
London, and to do their duty to God and to their neighbours; which will
enable them to become respectable in this world, and tend to make them
happy in the next.
Once a year, about six thousand charity children, dressed in uniforms of
different colours, assemble in St. Paul’s Cathedral, on benches raised to
a great height one above the other, circularly, under the dome. The
order with which each school finds its own situation, and the union of so
many voices, all raised at one moment to the praise of their great
Creator, as they chant the hundredth psalm on the entrance of the
clergyman, cause a most delightful and affecting sensation in the minds
of the spectators. The solemnity of the place, and the hope that so much
innocence, under such protection, would be reared to virtue and
happiness, must add greatly to the effect.
This uncommon scene is well described in the following lines.
’Twas in the pleasant month of June, their hands and faces clean,
The children walking two and two, in red, and blue, and green;
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of St. Paul’s, they, like Thames’ waters,
flow.
Oh! what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own!
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs;
Thousands of little boys and girls, raising their innocent hands;
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings, the seats of heav’n among.
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor:
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.